How to Deliver Real Estate Photos to Agents: Sizes, Specs and Turnaround
Export settings that survive every portal, how many photos a listing needs, what next-morning delivery really means, and why a real estate gallery should never expire or ask for a password.
Short answer
Export JPEG in sRGB at 2000 to 3000 pixels on the long edge, name the files by address in publication order, and deliver one link with downloads on, no password and no expiry. Agents upload the whole set to a portal that recompresses it anyway, so the delivery is judged on whether it created work for them, not on file size.
The shoot took ninety minutes. The listing goes live tomorrow morning, the open house is Saturday, and the agent has already texted twice. Real estate is the one photography genre where the deadline is set by somebody else's calendar and never moves, and where the person receiving your work will spend about forty seconds looking at it before pushing it somewhere else.
That last part is what most delivery advice misses. An agent is not admiring your photographs. They are downloading everything, uploading it to a portal that will resize and recompress it, and getting on with the next property. A delivery that makes that easy gets you the next twelve listings. A delivery that creates work for them gets you replaced by whoever is cheaper and faster.
- What the agent actually does with your files
- Export settings that survive every portal
- How many photos a listing needs
- The delivery itself
- What next morning really means
- The relisting problem
- Twilight, drone, video and floor plans
- Charging for speed
- The per property checklist
- Common questions
What the agent actually does with your files
Follow one delivery through to the end and the requirements become obvious. The agent opens your link, downloads everything in one action, and uploads the set to their MLS or portal. The portal resizes and recompresses each image to its own specification, generates its own thumbnails, and publishes. The agent then pulls three or four frames back out for a social post, a window card and an email to their database.
Four things follow from that, and they are worth more than any amount of retouching:
- They need everything at once. Individual downloads are for wedding couples choosing favourites. An agent wants one button.
- They need it without an account. Every login screen is a support message, usually from an assistant, usually on the morning it is due.
- The order matters. Portals publish in the order files arrive, and the first image is the one buyers see in search results. Your filenames decide which photograph sells the house.
- They will come back. Months later, for a relist, a brochure, or a different agent at the same firm.
Export settings that survive every portal
The honest position first: MLS and portal requirements vary, and anyone who tells you there is one universal specification is guessing. Different MLSs cap dimensions and file sizes differently, and portals in different countries differ again. Ask the agent which system they upload to once, write it down, and you never think about it again.
That said, a handful of settings are safe almost everywhere, and they are safe because they are conservative:
| Setting | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Format | JPEG | Universally accepted. HEIC, PNG and TIFF are rejected by many systems, and HEIC straight off a phone is a common cause of a failed upload |
| Colour space | sRGB | The single most common cause of "the photos look flat on the website". Adobe RGB files shift badly once a portal strips the profile |
| Long edge | 2000 to 3000 px | Comfortably above what portals display, comfortably below the caps that reject an upload |
| Quality | 80 to 90 | The portal will recompress anyway. Sending a 15 MB file achieves nothing except a slower upload for the agent |
| Sharpening | For screen, moderate | These images are looked at on phones, not printed |
| Metadata | Keep copyright, strip GPS | Your credit stays attached. The exact coordinates of a vacant property do not need publishing |
On aspect ratio. Most portals present in something close to 4:3 and will crop whatever you send. If you shoot 3:2, look at the top and bottom of each frame and ask whether a crop would cut anything you needed. This is the reason experienced real estate shooters leave a little more ceiling than feels right at the time.
On file naming. Number them in the order you want them published, zero padded, with the address in the name: 12-oak-street-01-front.jpg. Zero padding matters more than it sounds, because 10.jpg sorts before 2.jpg in almost every system that has ever existed, and an agent bulk uploading will not fix it for you.
How many photos a listing needs
More is not better here, and unlike wedding work the ceiling is often set by the portal rather than by taste. Many systems cap the number of images per listing, and buyers stop scrolling long before a large set ends.
| Property | Typical delivered | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Studio or one bedroom flat | 12 to 18 | Every room, one wide and one detail each |
| Two or three bedroom house | 20 to 30 | The standard job. Exterior front, all reception rooms, kitchen, every bedroom, main bathroom, garden |
| Four bedrooms and up | 30 to 45 | Second bathrooms and secondary bedrooms get one frame each, not three |
| Prestige or unusual | 40 to 60 | Where twilight, drone and detail frames genuinely earn their place |
The frames that matter most, in the order they matter: the exterior front, the main reception room, the kitchen, the main bedroom, the garden or view. Everything else is confirmation that the property is what those five suggested.
The delivery itself
Given what the agent does, the delivery should be a single link that opens to a grid, with downloads switched on and nothing in the way. No password, no account, no expiry.
Skip the password. The photographs are about to be published on the open internet. A password on a real estate gallery protects nothing and guarantees at least one message from an assistant who was forwarded the link without it. This is the opposite of the advice for weddings and portraits, and the reason is simply that the audience is different.
Name the gallery by address. An agent handling nine listings needs to find yours in an inbox six weeks later. "12 Oak Street" works. "Final photos v2" does not.
Give them one archive and individual files. The archive is for the portal upload. The individual downloads are for the three frames they want for social media that afternoon without pulling eighty megabytes to a phone.
Send it to the person, not the agency. Delivery to a shared inbox goes missing. Delivery to the agent who booked you gets a reply.
What next morning really means
The market standard for a straightforward residential shoot is delivery by the next morning, and for many agents that is the whole basis on which they choose a photographer. Not the quality of the light. The certainty that the photographs will be there when the listing is scheduled to go live.
Which means the useful promise is not "24 hours". It is "in your inbox by 9am the next working day", because that is the sentence an agent can plan around. A shoot at 4pm on Friday delivered at 3pm on Saturday technically met 24 hours and still missed the listing.
Structuring the work backwards from that:
- Cull on site or in the car. Twenty five keepers from an eighty frame shoot, decided while you still remember which bedroom was which.
- Batch the corrections. Real estate interiors from one property share a white balance and a lens profile. One set of adjustments, pasted across, then individual verticals.
- Verticals last, and only where it shows. Straightening every frame is where the evening disappears. Straighten the ones with a strong architectural line and stop.
- Export and deliver in one action. If your export folder is also your delivery, the last step costs nothing. That is the argument in the faster real estate delivery workflow.
The relisting problem
This is the part that separates real estate delivery from every other genre, and almost nobody plans for it.
Properties do not sell and come back. A listing expires, the vendor changes agent, and four months later somebody needs those photographs again. Sometimes it is the same agent. Sometimes it is a different agency who found your credit and would like to talk. Either way, a request that should take you thirty seconds turns into an awkward conversation if the link has expired and the files are on a drive in a cupboard.
Galleries that expire after thirty or ninety days are a storage decision made by a platform and passed on to you. In wedding work the cost is a couple returning on an anniversary. In real estate the cost is a repeat booking, and it happens far more often, because a single agent may relist a dozen properties a year.
Keep the link alive. It is the cheapest client retention available in this genre.
Twilight, drone, video and floor plans
These arrive on a different schedule from the interiors and should be delivered on a different schedule too.
- Twilight exteriors are shot in a twenty minute window, often on a separate visit. If they are ready later than the main set, deliver the main set anyway and add the twilight frames to the same link. Holding thirty photographs hostage to two is how a deadline gets missed.
- Drone stills belong in the same gallery, in sequence, not in a separate folder. Agents forget separate folders exist.
- Video is where file sizes get awkward. A short walkthrough can be larger than the entire photo set, so a gallery that streams a preview and offers the full file as a download beats sending it as an attachment. There is more on that in sending large files to clients.
- Floor plans usually come from a third party and arrive last. Add them to the same link rather than emailing a PDF, and the agent has one address for the whole property.
Charging for speed
Same day delivery is a genuine premium and should be priced as one. It changes how you shoot, how you cull, and what your evening looks like, and the agent who needs it needs it badly enough to pay.
A workable structure:
- Standard. By 9am the next working day. Included.
- Same day. Delivered by 8pm on the day of the shoot, booked in advance, priced as an add on.
- Selects tonight. A middle option that costs you very little: eight to ten frames within a few hours, the full set on the standard schedule. The agent can list and post immediately, and you keep your evening. The staged approach is the same one used for same day event delivery.
That middle option is the one to sell. It is nearly free to produce if the gallery is published once and added to, and it removes the pressure that makes photographers rush a full edit.
The per property checklist
Volume work survives on repetition, not judgement. This is the whole delivery in one list:
- Export JPEG, sRGB, 2000 to 3000 px long edge, quality 80 to 90.
- Strip GPS, keep the copyright field.
- Rename with the address, zero padded, in publication order.
- Hero frame first. It is the one buyers see in search results.
- Gallery named by address, downloads on, no password, no expiry.
- Whole set as one archive plus individual downloads.
- Link sent to the booking agent by name, before 9am.
- Twilight, drone and floor plans added to the same link as they arrive.
Set that up once and a property goes from card to delivered link in a few minutes. The real estate photographers guide covers the shooting side, and the docs walk through the gallery setup itself.
Common questions
What size should real estate photos be for the MLS? Caps vary by system, so ask the agent which one they upload to. A long edge of 2000 to 3000 pixels as JPEG in sRGB is accepted by effectively every portal, and is well above what any of them actually display.
Why do my photos look washed out on the property website? Almost always Adobe RGB. Portals strip the colour profile, and a wide gamut file without its profile renders flat and desaturated. Export sRGB and the problem disappears.
How many photos should I deliver for a listing? Twenty to thirty for a typical two or three bedroom house. Check whether the agent's system caps the number, because some do, and a set that exceeds the cap gets truncated by whoever uploads it rather than curated by you.
Should real estate galleries have a password? No. The photographs are about to be public, the link gets forwarded around the agency, and a password only produces support messages on the morning the listing goes live.
How long should I keep the gallery online? Indefinitely if you can. Relisting is common, and an expired link turns an easy repeat booking into an awkward conversation about where the files went.