Real Estate Exterior Photo Cleanup

The wrong day to photograph the front

A listing agent is photographing a red-brick townhouse that will be listed for about 600,000 dollars. It is collection week on a city street where every house puts its bins on the sidewalk. Two green garbage bins and a blue recycling bin stand right in front of the stoop, and the nearest one hides the bottom steps. The eye goes to the bins before it reaches the front door, and the exterior photo is the first picture buyers see.

Who uses this

• Agents who photograph their own listings on the day of a showing
• Owners selling a city townhouse or row house without an agent
• Photographers who cannot move bins or cars from the street before the shot

How the edit is handled

A human editor removes the bins, and rebuilds the sidewalk paving and its joints, the bottom steps of the stoop and the iron railing and low fence behind them, so that the lines continue. The rest of the street is left as it is.

Only the temporary items are removed. The brick, the windows, the front door, the stoop, the neighbouring houses and the buildings behind are not changed, and a listing photo should not hide what a buyer will see in person. Because the whole picture is rebuilt, fine texture and the exact number of steps can differ slightly from the original, so we compare the result with it at full size.

What to upload

Send the original at full resolution and list anything else that should stay or go, such as a parked car or a sign that belongs to the property. Please follow the rules of your local listing service. For other fixes to property photos, see real estate photo editing.

Private: recreated on our own images, not customer photos

The before/after shown here is recreated on images created or licensed for this site — never a real customer's photo. Your upload is seen only by the editor working on it, and the edit comes with free revisions within 14 days of delivery if anything needs adjusting.