Tips For Displaying Property Photos On Your Real Estate Website
Good Listing Photos Are Critical
According to Realtor magazine, it is the number one thing buyers are looking for when browsing your website.
When I reviewed some Hotjar recordings from my website, the thing that stood out right away was my photos were not at the top of the page, forcing users to scroll through some things that did not interest them as much to view the photos. I quickly moved the photos to the top of the page to eliminate that issue.
We allow all photos to be viewed while scrolling vs. clicking, as I feel users can view more photos faster while scrolling thru them vs. having to click to see each one. Our MLS allows 25 photos per listing. If a buyer focuses in on 5 listings, they would have to click 125 times to see all those photos. I bet no one has clicked that many times. It is annoying in my opinion.
I realize Zillow and others make users click to see each photo, but I still do not think that is the optimal method to display photos. Zillow also enlarges all the photos provided by our MLS, causing them to look blurry and unprofessional. I think it is best to show photos at their original resolution.
Do not crop photos. At our MLS they put their branding on each photo at the bottom. They said they are doing this to protect the photos from being loaded onto Craigslist, so it is required to show their branding. Ironically, the MLS’s public website crops out their branding, thereby breaking their own rule, but everyone else shows the entire photo.
If you have some website design tips related to photos, please share them in the comments.
Sep Niakan
Posted at 10:15h, 22 NovemberI agree with having the photos start “in the fold”. In my next rendition of my condo site, I am going to set it up so the user can see the entire photo (I am sticking with clicking through photos for now) without having to scroll at all. (Right, now the user has to scroll down a bit to see the whole photo, which is annoying ). The question I have in my mind is . . . image dimensions vs page/image load speed. I set up all my images on my site to be 1300px width, but in the default view it’s something like 1000px and then a user can click to view “larger”. A MICROSCOPIC portion of my users actually clicks to make the pics bigger, which makes me wonder whether people are fine with BIG pics and don’t really need REALLY BIG pics. And in exchange, your page and images can load way faster which can make a big impact on user experience on your site.
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 12:44h, 22 NovemberMy guess is there are two reasons. When I enlarged one pic as a test it was only 4 pixels bigger, so if they feel it is not going to be much bigger then they won’t try to enlarge it. In this case it looked the same size as 4 pixels is not enough to notice a difference.
Also you have the white font on the white background. You have some shadow around it so it is visible but it does not jump out.
I am not sure I follow you on page loading speed. You download the images from the MLS I assume. Are you then resizing them before uploading them to your website?
Even if you do resize them with most people on 4G or some type of broadband connection there is not going to be a huge loading difference. Also, are you loading all photos right away or only once they click to see the next photo.
On our side we do not do any processing of the images we get from the MLS, so we just show them as large as they come, which for our MLS is a maximum of 640×480.
Urmila Ranak
Posted at 12:19h, 04 MayMy opinion is you then resizing before uploading them to your website?
Even if you do resize them with most people on 4G or some type of
broadband connection there is not going to be a huge loading difference.
When I enlarged one pic as a test it was only 4 pixels
bigger, so if they feel it is not going to be much bigger then they
won’t try to enlarge it. On our side we do not do any
processing of the images we get from the MLS, so we just show them as
large as they come, which for our MLS is a maximum of 640×480.
Also, are you loading all photos right away or only once they click to see the next photo. In this case it looked the same size as 4 pixels is not enough to notice a difference.
I am not sure I follow you on page loading speed. you can see from my web page [link removed]. my web page have many photos about home.