Photos that stage well

The hard requirements

These are checked in the browser, before anything is uploaded. A file that fails one is refused straight away and costs nothing.

• JPEG, PNG, WEBP. A photo from an iPhone is usually HEIC, and is converted for you when you add it.
• Up to 10 MB. Larger than that, export it smaller rather than cropping it.
• At least 768 pixels on each side. A screenshot of a listing is usually below this. Use the original file.

The photo check

Every photo is looked at before any staging happens. It decides whether the image is an empty interior that can be staged at all, and it reads the room while it is there: what the space is, which surfaces are fixed, where the light comes from, what must not be covered up.

If it says no you get a plain sentence explaining why, and no generation is spent. The usual reasons are that the room is already furnished, that the image is not an interior at all, or that it is too dark, too blurry or too obstructed to work from.

What stages well

• An empty room. Empty is the job. A few boxes in a corner are survivable; a furnished room is not, and will be refused.
• The whole room in frame. Shoot from a corner, with two walls and the floor visible. A staged room needs floor to stand on, and a photo cropped to one wall gives the model nowhere to put anything.
• Daylight, curtains open, lights on. Even light beats dramatic light here. Deep shadow hides the floor.
• Camera at chest height, held level. A tilted camera makes the walls lean, and furniture placed into a leaning room looks wrong in a way nobody can name.
• Sharp, and the right way up. Obvious, and still the most common reason a photo comes back refused.

What to avoid

• Very wide angle lenses. A fisheye bends the walls, and the staging follows the bent walls.
• Two rooms fighting for the frame. One room per photo. If a kitchen is visible from the living room that is fine and it will be handled: the room you are shooting is furnished properly, and the one behind it is kept deliberately sparse so it does not compete.
• A photo of a photo, or of a screen. The moiré, the reflections and the frame edge all end up in the input.
• Anything already watermarked. The mark is part of the image, so it survives into the staged version.