Tips for Submitting Photos for Your MLS Listing

How to Provide Photos

• E-mail photos as attachments to dan@sellyourhomeservices.com - OR
• Upload photos to the online version of the Property Information Form.

Photo Order

To specify a specific order for photos to appear on your listing, please include the photo number in the file name (for example, 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg).

File Sizes

Photo files uploaded to the MLS will be compressed automatically - often to a size of 100 KB or smaller. I imagine this is to facilitate efficient file storage and file transfer on a database with thousands of listings. This does not imply low quality, but that the file size corresponds reasonably with the listing gallery size.

This means that there is no particular advantage to taking photos on a very high quality camera setting (which can produce file sizes as high as 12 MB). These large file sizes can cause e-mail delays, and long waits for uploading and downloading.

Best Practices

• When taking photos specifically for your listing, consider adjusting your camera settings to “VGA” mode, which produces images sized for e-mailing. (This is not ideal if you plan to print images on high quality flyers or publications).
• Note that a smartphone camera provides more than enough quality for the image sizes allowed on the database. When e-mailing from most smartphones, you will be given the option to send full-sized image files, or smaller files which use less data.
• If your file sizes are very large (2 MB+), consider a free program such as Fotosizer (w​ww.fotosizer.com) ​to reduce image file sizes before attempting to send.
• Consider sharing files with me through w​ww.wetransfer.com ​or w​ww.dropbox.com as an alternative to e-mailing large attachments.

"Do No Harm"

Photos are essential for enticing a buyer to visit. Detailed photos are a good thing - usually. But be sure that you don't give buyers a reason not to visit. Consider this article on Trulia:
"10 Ways Your Listing Photos Are Killing an Awesome Deal"