How to Take Good Airbnb Photos: Size, Lighting, and Angles

Clean surfaces, straighten bedding, hide cleaning supplies, empty bins, and remove loose cables. Open curtains and blinds. Replace dead bulbs and make sure lamps in the same room have similar colour temperatures.

Stage lightly. A tray on the bed or twelve cushions on the sofa can make a room look like a set rather than somewhere to stay. A book by a chair, a folded towel, or a coffee setup can show use without creating clutter.

Find the time when each important room receives bright but indirect light. Harsh midday sun can burn out windows and create hard patches on the floor. A bright overcast day is often easier than a perfectly sunny one.

Turn on practical lamps if they make the room feel warmer, but avoid relying on flash. A phone flash creates flat light, sharp shadows, and bright reflections. If a room is still dark, steady the phone on a tripod and let it use a slower exposure.

Clean the lens first. Switch on grid lines, use the standard rear camera, and choose the highest practical resolution. Avoid digital zoom. If your phone has a wide lens, use it carefully and keep important furniture away from the stretched edges.

Hold the camera around chest height and keep vertical lines vertical. Tilting upwards makes walls fall away from the viewer. Tilting downwards exaggerates the floor and can make furniture look oddly small.

Airbnb currently tells home hosts to use landscape photos that are at least 1024 x 683 pixels. Treat that as the minimum, not a target to shrink every image towards. Upload the largest clean version you have because a larger original gives the listing more room to resize and crop the photograph for different screens.

Do not enlarge a small, soft image just to reach the minimum dimensions. Reshoot or return to the original file instead. Keep the room, bed, view, or other main subject away from the extreme edges so the image still reads clearly when it appears as a search thumbnail or in the gallery.

For each important room, take one wide establishing view, one second angle that explains the layout, and one closer image of a useful or distinctive feature. Bedrooms might include the whole bed, the view towards storage or the door, and the bedside setup. Kitchens might include the full workspace, the dining connection, and the coffee or cooking equipment.

Take several careful versions while you are in position. Small changes in height and framing are easier to compare later than to recreate after the room has been reset.

Guests need evidence. Show the entrance, parking, stairs, workspace, storage, bathroom, outdoor boundary, and sleeping arrangements. If the sofa converts into a bed, photograph it in both states. If the view is a selling point, show it from the place a guest will actually see it.

Accessibility features deserve clear wide and close views. Photograph thresholds, steps, doorways, grab rails, and the route into the property without using a dramatic angle that hides scale.

Straighten lines, correct exposure, reduce distracting highlights, and make small colour adjustments. Apply the same general look across the set so one room does not appear blue and the next orange.

Do not stretch a room, replace a view, remove permanent defects, or add an amenity that is not there. A useful edit helps the camera match what the eye saw. It does not rewrite the property.

Open your photographs at full size, then shrink them to phone-sized thumbnails. The first view reveals blur and editing artefacts; the second tells you whether someone can understand the room quickly. Judge each photograph by the information it adds, not how much time you spent taking it.

Consider this illustrative review of a bedroom set. It is a decision-making example, not a customer case study or a claim about booking results.

Airbnb recommends including at least one photograph of every room or space so each can appear in the photo tour. Assign images to the right rooms, add factual descriptions where they clarify a feature, and remove near-duplicates that do not add information.

The first five photos receive the most prominent placement on the listing, and the first image becomes the large cover image shown in search. Use those opening positions for different reasons to book, then arrange the remaining images in a logical walk through the property.