Great photographs are key to showing off your home at its best. You can use a professional photographer (we have partnered with Viewber Stand out online: How Viewber’s Marketing Pack helps you sell your property | Knowledge Hub Article | Hiizzy), but smartphone cameras are more than capable of taking great pictures of your home, especially if you put some time into preparing your spaces before you start snapping. Here are some tips to taking great photographs so that you can get your home ready for its moment in the spotlight.
Prepare your space: When it comes to personal belongings, less really is more when it comes to selling your home. Clear away clutter and make sure your home is clean and tidy, with everything in its place. Make beds, straighten pictures, and sort out any imperfections before taking your pictures.
Think clutter-free, not lived in: It’s well worth spending a bit of time removing excess furniture, fridge magnets, personal ornaments and those small appliances on kitchen worktops - they just distract from the natural features of your home. They can also make the space look cramped, not something you’ll be aiming for when taking your pictures!
Set the scene: Stage each room to highlight its best features. You want potential buyers to be able to see themselves starting their own new chapter in your home. Consider adding a few tasteful props to enhance the visual appeal of your space.
Don’t forget about kerb appeal: The first image on your property listing will normally be a picture of the outside of your home. First impressions really do count, so putting some time into simple tasks like cleaning the windows and front door, tidying up the front garden, moving cars and bikes off the drive and filling up any empty flower pots or planters with a splash of colour will help your property to stand out from the crowd.
Think of the atmosphere you want to create: Different homes have different styles and target audiences, so think about the potential buyers for your home, and what they might be looking for. Whether you want to create a cosy and inviting atmosphere, or a sleek and modern one, choose your lighting, colours and props accordingly to create the desired effect.
Professional tip: If you’re selling your home in winter, take pictures before the Christmas decorations go up! Not only can decorations make a space seem smaller, your images will be dated once Christmas is over. It could give the appearance that you’ve been on the market for a while, and make buyers less inclined to want to view your property.
How to set up your smartphone.
The camera in your pocket is more powerful than you think. Take some time to get to grips with your smartphone’s camera settings and you’ll get the most out of every shot. Here are some helpful smartphone features and how to use them.
Turn on Grids: This framing tool will help keep your shots straight. Turn on Grids in your phone’s camera settings.
Switch off Flash: Using a flash can create a harsh look, so ideally you’ll want to be shooting in natural light. More about that later - but for now, make sure your flash is switched off.
HDR setting: Switch this on to make sure you capture details in perfect clarity. You can go back and turn this setting off after you’ve taken your pictures.
Wide / Zoom: New smartphones often have pre-sets that allow you to zoom out (0.5x) to get a wider view. This can be useful to capture a room’s full aspect.
Tips for taking great pictures of your home
Lighting is your secret weapon: Shots that show your home bathed in natural light invite warmth and create a welcoming atmosphere. Open those curtains wide and pick the brightest time of day, so your home shines. If some rooms don’t have windows, turning on lamps can create a more cosy atmosphere.
Composition: The Grids setting will help with framing and ensuring your pictures are straight. Zoom out slightly for establishing shots where you want people to understand the size of a room. Normal mid-range shots work best from a straight-on perspective. Consider the features you want to highlight, like a large window or fireplace, and make sure they are positioned centrally in the shot. Don’t hold your phone at an angle - this can make the picture distorted.
Think about using the panoramic setting: When taking a panoramic picture, you don’t have to do the full 180 degree shot; just do as much as you need then edit the picture and set it to 4:3 to see amazing results.
Holding your phone: Hold your phone straight (chest-height, not above your head), and horizontally (with the long edge parallel to the floor), not vertically. This is important, as the images in your Hiizzy property listing will show up within a landscape/horizontal frame. If you upload images taken vertically, they will be cropped to fit into the horizontal format and may not display as you intended.
Choose the right spot: You want to show off your home, but that doesn’t mean you should be taking dozens of shots of every room from every angle. Pick the right spot to capture each room. To give your image depth, you should aim to include three walls in each picture. This often means the best place to take your pictures is in the doorway or a corner of the room.
Less is more: Sharing too many pictures of your property could actually put off potential buyers. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that people will want to see hundreds of pictures of your property before they visit, but they don’t. Be selective with your final choices.
The magic number: A dozen well-lit shots should be enough to showcase your home’s interior and exterior, including any outdoor garden or patio areas. Capturing unique or standout features of your home can help it stand out from other listings. More than one angle of a kitchen, living room or large bedroom is fine. But it’s best to avoid unnecessary pictures of stairs, intercoms and other areas that are unlikely to make someone want to view your property.
Use your listing pictures to highlight what makes your home unique. They are a visual guide that can help potential buyers imagine their life unfolding in your home. The first image you upload is normally an exterior shot of your home, so people browsing properties can instantly visualise where it is.
Include video if you wish: Hiizzy allows you to add media links to your listing. You can copy the URLs from Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube or Vimeo to give potential buyers a closer look at your home. Be selective here too, one great video will work better than several.
And remember, when taking pictures for your listing on Hiizzy - horizontal pictures (landscape) will display more effectively within your listing than vertical (portrait) ones.
So now you’re in the fourth section of your listing process - ‘Upload Photos and Floor plans’, and you should have a great collection of stunning photos of your home. If you’re creating your listing using your computer, you’ll be able to drag and drop your chosen photographs as image files (jpg, jpeg, png) into the box. If you’re using your mobile phone to list your property, you click the ‘Upload photos’ button, and it will give you the choice to either go to your photo library to choose your pictures, or to take a new picture using your camera. If you’ve already taken a selection of photos of your home, go to your photo library, find them there, and select the pictures that you want. You can select quite a few if you want, and you'll see them appear within this section. There’s also a button that says ‘Manage photos uploaded for your property’. This is where you can change the order of the photographs. Perhaps you want to make sure that a particular picture goes first. That's going to be the one that people see when they first click into your property, so you can use the buttons to move your preferred shot, your chosen main picture right up to the top of the list. Do you have a video of your house? Can you take a virtual home tour and then post it as an Instagram reel? If you do that, you can include it on your Hiizzy property listing as well. You just need to copy the link from your Instagram or TikTok reel, and paste that into the ‘Add Media Link’ box. If you need help in doing that, go to your chosen reel, click the three little dots or the arrow, and look for the option to ‘Copy Link’. Then paste that link into the ‘Add Media Link’ box. If you want to continue with your listing and come back to this stage later, that’s fine - with your Hiizzy property listing, you can edit it anytime - add more images, change their order or add a media link whenever you want.