Image sizes and formats for property portals

The most common cause of poor-looking portal photos is not the camera but the wrong aspect ratio. The major property portals display images in landscape, usually around 4 by 3, and crop everything else hard. If you upload a portrait shot or an extremely wide panorama, the portal's automatic crop decides what stays visible, and it rarely matches your intention. So shoot and crop in landscape, and leave some room at the edges so an automatic crop does not cut off the most important part.

For resolution a simple principle applies: better to upload too large than too small. Portals downscale large images to their display sizes themselves, and the result is almost always better than upscaling a small image. A long edge of around 2000 to 2500 pixels is a good target for most portals. That keeps the photo sharp in the large detail view while staying manageable in file size.

The right file format for photos is JPEG. It is compatible everywhere and compresses photographs efficiently. PNG is meant for screenshots and graphics with hard edges and makes property photos unnecessarily large without looking any better. More modern formats like WebP are more economical but are not reliably accepted by every upload form. For daily portal uploads, a well-tuned JPEG keeps you on the safe side.

With compression the art lies in the middle. Too much compression creates visible blocks and artefacts, especially on smooth walls and in the sky. Too little compression bloats the file and slows loading. A JPEG quality around 80 percent is a proven compromise where the file stays small and the eye notices no loss. Pay particular attention to large single-colour areas, because that is where compression errors show up first.

Keep the difference between screen and print in mind. A brochure as PDF or a printed folder needs more resolution than the portal display, because print resolves finer than a monitor. If you keep your photos at a generous size from the start, you can downscale for the portal and use full resolution for print without shooting twice. It does not work the other way round: a small portal image will never be sharp in print.

An often forgotten point is file names and order. Many portals sort images by file name, and the first image becomes the cover shot that decides whether someone clicks. So name your images with leading numbers like 01, 02, 03, and put the strongest subject, usually the facade or the living area, in first place. A strong cover image at the correct size wins more clicks than ten good images in the wrong order.

Finally a word on editing: cropping, exposure and colour correction are entirely uncritical and part of normal preparation. But as soon as you change image content generatively, for example furnishing rooms virtually, a labelling requirement has applied since August 2026. Keep technical preparation and content changes cleanly separated, and your portal images will be sharp, fast to load and legally clean.