Hospitality
Are you ready for week-long guests?
Guests arriving for a week-long stay have different expectations. Unlike the speedy one or two night stay, guests who have booked a full week with
Let’s talk Airbnb photos! Guests make almost all of their booking decisions based on an Airbnb’s photos. As they swipe through a sea of thumbnails, the quality of the photos becomes a proxy for the quality of the Airbnb itself. Everything else in the Airbnb listing—the description, the amenities, the stars—become tools to verify that the stay will actually live up to the expectations set in the pictures. This is why the photos matter so much: they’re the very top of your marketing funnel. All of your bookings, revenue, and reviews start with this visual first impression.
Guests make almost all of their booking decisions based on an Airbnb’s photos. As we swipe through a sea of thumbnails, the quality of the photos becomes a proxy for the quality of the Airbnb itself.
Horizontal Orientation
2:3 Crop Ratio
683 x 1024 Pixels Minimum
Maximize Natural Light
Turn Off The Flash
Turn On The 3×3 Grid
Use Captions
Order Photos Like A Tour
So our goal is to help you create an irresistible series of photographs that grabs the attention of your ideal guest and doesn’t let go. Whether you’re on the cusp of launching your very first Airbnb or you’re an experienced host looking to update your listing, this post is for you. After years of photographing Airbnbs for blog posts and one-on-one consultations with hosts, we’ve broken down our professional photography shoot routine into this step-by-step guide.
All the photos you’re seeing here were taken at Holly Crawford Ellis’s incredible Airbnb in Greensboro, Alabama. Just follow the our 20 step process, and your Airbnb listing will be brimming with professional-grade photographs that reel in the bookings too. (If you want a sneak peak of the finished product, just scroll to the bottom of the post and take a look at the grid.) Just grab your phone (yep, loads of our photos at Big Heart Hosting are taken with a smartphone) and let’s get started!
This is why the photos matter so much: they’re the very top of your marketing funnel. All of your bookings, revenue, and reviews start with this visual first impression.
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A great series of Airbnb photos begins with thorough preparation. Before you start snapping pictures, prep your Airbnb for the photoshoot with these five steps.
Let’s start with the end in mind: your photos should create a tour of your Airbnb. If you were guiding a potential guest through your space in person, what would you highlight? Grab a sheet of paper and answer these questions to jumpstart your photoshoot planning. Then create your checklist of the top 20 must-have photos. We’ll use this list as your launching off point when you pick up your camera.
Yes, your photos absolutely should capture the essence of your Airbnb, all that stuff that makes this place uniquely yours. But your photos should also include any make-or-break logistical information guests should know before booking. Even if you’ve included these practical details in your house rules, your listing description, or your amenities, many guests will make reservations based solely on your Airbnb photos. Folding safety and logistical information into your photo reel can redirect guests who would wind up disappointed at your place on to a better fit somewhere else. (And you’ll avoid the bad review.)
Yes, your photos should absolutely capture the essence of your Airbnb, all that stuff that makes this place uniquely yours. But your photos should also include any make-or-break logistical information guests should know before booking.
Beyond some basic brightness and contrast adjustments, there are no heavy-handed photoshop recommendations coming up later in this post, so now is the time to make sure your Airbnb is sparkling! If you’re looking for some deep cleaning guidance, check out this post about spring cleaning your Airbnb. As you prep for the photoshoot, keep an eye out for these things in particular.
Once it’s squeaky clean, prepare your Airbnb the way you would for a guest. Arrange your flowers, set out your welcome snack, write hello on your chalkboard, turn down the corner of the bed. Leave your hospitality fingerprint on the space before you photograph it. These details will help set you apart online. Just remember that each one of your Airbnb photos makes a promise to all your future guests. You’re saying this is what the space will look like when you arrive. Don’t make any promises you won’t be able to consistently keep.
Leave your hospitality fingerprint on the space before you photograph it. These details will help set you apart online. Just remember that each one of your Airbnb photos makes a promise to all your future guests.
No one wants to go on a cloudy vacation, so be patient and wait until you’ve got several hours of full sunshine before you start your photoshoot. Bright photos translate to happy spaces for potential guests. Here are a few ways to maximize the natural light in your Airbnb photos.
No one wants to go on a cloudy vacation, so be patient and wait until you’ve got several hours of full sunshine before you start your photoshoot.
As you may have guessed by now, the more light, the better the photoshoot. Just before you’re ready to start taking photos, walk through your Airbnb and turn on all the lights.
With your Airbnb fully primed, it’s time for the photoshoot to begin! Our day-to-day lives are flooded with smartphone photos, but our goal here is to create beautiful compositions, not just another round of snapshots. Slow down and frame each shot intentionally. This methodical cadence will give you an abundance of top-notch photos to choose from later.
If you have access to a more comprehensive camera, go for it! A wide angle lens can make shooting interior spaces a breeze. But as we mentioned at the top of this post, loads of the photos you see on Big Heart Hosting are taken with smartphones. (Approximately half the shots in this post were!) The camera in your pocket is now more powerful than the professional equipment sold a decade or two ago. Your technique will actually matter more than the price of your gear.
The camera in your pocket is now more powerful than the professional equipment sold a decade or two ago. Your technique will actually matter more than the price of your gear.
Regardless of the camera you’re using, be sure to disable the flash before you begin shooting. Flashes create these harsh, shallow bright spots that make any space feel smaller than it actually is. Between the sunshine and the lights, you’re Airbnb should be plenty bright enough for the photoshoot. (And if it isn’t, you might be discovering that your guests actually need better lighting during their stays.)
All the photos on Airbnb’s website and app will display horizontally, so set yourself up for success by shooting all of your Airbnb photos horizontally from the start. Every once in a rare while, a vertical shot is the only way to accurately capture a critical space in your Airbnb, like a bathroom. But since this creates a disruptive experience for guests swiping through your photo series, keep those vertical shots to an absolute minimum.
In the software settings, many smartphone cameras have the option to display a 3×3 grid while you take photos. If you have this feature, turn it on! It will help you in a few big ways.
Displaying the 3×3 grid during your photoshoot will help you leverage the fundamental photography theory known as the Rule of Thirds.
A photograph’s exposure has to do with how much light you’re allowing to hit the lens. This will translate into how bright or dark a photo turns out. Here are some tips to give each photo the best possible exposure.
Finally, make sure that the shot is focused on something intentional. Ask yourself, where do you want the viewer’s eye to go? Are you focusing on that throw pillow in the center or the bed? On the faucet over the kitchen sink? Make sure the focal point of this image is nice and crisp. With a smartphone, this almost always means just touching the screen where you want that sharp focus to be. Some smartphones will even programmatically blur the background to mimic a shallow depth of field, creating additional emphasis on the shot’s focal point.
We almost always start photographing an Airbnb space from its corners. Moving systematically through every one, we shrink back into the walls to create the widest possible angle of the room.
As we move through each room in an Airbnb, we work in four passes or phases, starting from the big, comprehensive shots and working our way down to the details. Here’s what to look for in each phase to make sure you capture the entire room.
Perhaps the most important piece of advice is this: take more photos than you could possibly use. For a larger space, this could mean hundreds of shots that you’ll whittle down to your three dozen best. (When we’re doing consultations, we’ll often end up with thousands of photos!) Think of your photoshoot as one big experiment. Some simple ideas will photograph beautifully and other exciting thoughts will turn out to be lackluster on screen. You won’t know which are which until you try! And after you’ve used all of the techniques above to frame the perfect photo, take multiple shots of every composition you create. While they’ll all look very similar, often the last photo you take will be your best.
Perhaps the most important piece of advice is this: take more photos than you could possibly use.
With an abundance of potential shots to choose from, it’s time to finalize the photo reel for your Airbnb listing. Follow these post-processing steps to create a finished series with a professional polish.
Time to narrow down your Airbnb photos! In your first sweep, tag your absolute favorites. These are the images you can’t wait to publish, the ones that accentuate the very best of your Airbnb. With these staples in place, reference your must-have photos list you created in Step 1 and fill in any gaps. As you start to compile your final series, it’s very likely that you’ll realize you’re missing a shot you need to create a cohesive photo series. That’s ok! Go back and grab it. (We rarely capture every photo we need in a single pass.)
Airbnb photos have a 2:3 ratio, the same ratio as the classic 4”x6” photos we all used to print. Different cameras shoot different ratios, and even if yours has a 2:3 baseline, you’ll want to crop each photo anyways. This is the second opportunity to frame the perfect shot. Set your cropping aspect ratio to 2:3 with a horizontal orientation. Now tighten up the framing around the most interesting aspects of the photo while still allowing the edge of the composition a bit of breathing room. If the photo feels lopsided, now is the time to level it out by tweaking the angle of the photo until all of your predominant horizontal and vertical lines follow the edge of the frame.
Now it’s time to enhance the image itself. While we use Adobe Photoshop for all of our final tweaks, any photo editing software will work. (For example, Apple Photos comes free on all Macs and works wonderfully.) If there is an “auto” enhancement option, this is probably your best bet. You’re looking for a bit more intensity that makes the image feel nice and sharp, but not fake. If you’re making more manual edits, these are the two adjustments we always recommend.
In the age of Instagram filters, adjusting the contrast of a photo is easy to overdo. You’re striving for rich, but realistic colors that show off your Airbnb.
The minimum resolution recommended by Airbnb is 683 x 1024 pixels. We’d recommend saving your images as much higher resolution photos. If your images are bigger than 1MB, perhaps consider saving a slightly smaller file, but as Airbnb’s technology has improved, the complaints about fuzzy uploads have decreased significantly. When in doubt, start by saving the maximize size and work backwards only if your uploads to your Airbnb listing are rendered blurry.
Finally, it’s time to upload your photos! The order here matters more than you might think. An intentional photo reel takes guests on a seamless tour of your Airbnb, one that highlights everything it has to offer. An arbitrary order creates a jarring, convoluted picture of what you actually offer. Here are our go-to tactics when we order Airbnb photos.
Captions are one of the most underutilized features on the Airbnb listing. It’s the perfect opportunity to introduce your personality and share the stories behind your Airbnb. With your photos in their final order, take the time to caption each photo (not just the first few). Use this space to narrate, to explain what guests are seeing on the screen, and to highlight what you personally love the most about this space you’ve created.
Captions are one of the most underutilized features on the Airbnb listing. It’s the perfect opportunity to introduce your personality and share the stories behind your Airbnb.
And finally, don’t forget that your Airbnb will (and should!) evolve overtime. As you update, upgrade, and continue to sink money and love into your place, document and advertise that progress in your Airbnb photos. If you’ve got reviews like “the photos don’t do this place justice!” you’re leaving good bookings (and money) on the table.
When you’re all said and done, you’ll have something that feels a little like this. Below you’ll also find some of the workhorse tools behind Big Heart Hosting.
The Google Pixel Line of Phones have some of the best cameras we’ve ever seen on smartphones. We never travel anywhere without our own Pixel phone. The output rivals our professional gear.
These tiny Moment Lenses transform smartphone photos into works of art. For interior photoshoots, the wide-angle lens in our go-to. Just don’t forget the matching case for your phone, which allows you to properly attach the lenses.
All our cropping and color adjustment for the entire blog has always been done in Adobe Photoshop. You can get a single app for about 20 bucks a month.
Thank you so much for reading about our Airbnb photography routine! If you’re an Airbnb host and this post has helped you up your Airbnb photos game, we would love to see your before and after series! Just send us a few of your before and after pictures and we might just include them in an upcoming post here on Big Heart Hosting. Until next time, happy hosting!
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The number one question we hear from hosts is “What am I forgetting to put in my Airbnb?” This collection is the definitive answer to that question. In our signature product, we go room-by-room, step-by-step until your Airbnb is perfectly appointed and ready to impress. Bye-bye blindspots and hello happy guests!
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You’re an ambitious Airbnb host with a big heart. But on some days, hosting isn’t exactly what you had imagined. Maybe it’s overwhelming. Or isolating. Or just not making the kind of money you had envisioned. At Big Heart Hosting, we’re on a mission to help hosts like you thrive, not just get by. We create step-by-step resources that bring together the best hosting strategies from around the world. We’ll give you the knowledge and community you need to create the joyful, prosperous Airbnb you deserve.
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Guests arriving for a week-long stay have different expectations. Unlike the speedy one or two night stay, guests who have booked a full week with
You knew the honeymoon period of hosting wouldn’t last forever, but you never thought you would end up with a case of hosting burnout. After
At Big Heart Hosting, we’re on a mission to help hosts like you thrive, not just get by. We create step-by-step resources that bring together the best hosting strategies from around the world. We’ll give you the knowledge and community you need to create the joyful, prosperous Airbnb you deserve.
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