How to take better photos of your property
Key takeaway: Make sure you have at least 24 high-quality photos per property that respect photo guidelines.
Did you recently add photos but they haven’t shown up on your page yet? Take a look at the tips below to find possible reasons why some photos aren’t displayed on our website.
The quality of your photos isn’t high enough
The Extranet photo tool detects and blocks photos of low quality – those which are too blurry, dark, light, or over-pixelated. We recommend a minimum resolution of 1280 by 900 pixels (1.15 megapixels) to ensure guests get the best possible impression of your accommodation, helping to improve your conversion rates.
To present your property to potential guests in the best possible way, we only display photos larger than 300 x 300 pixels.
You uploaded more photos than we can display
We’re constantly testing which photos encourage guests to book, and we know that customers like to see at least 24 photos per property. Our research shows that there’s an ideal maximum number of photos on a page as well, which is why we’ll only show the first 45 in your gallery.
Your photos contain watermarks or logos
We recommend adding photos without any logos, watermarks, or text. This can distract from the image and may make a potential customer leave your property page. Remember that you must respect Booking.com’s photo guidelines.
Key takeaway: Property photography plays an important role in helping guests choose a place to stay. In order to make the most of your photos, you must respect our guidelines and leverage our best practices wherever possible.
Photography guidelines
A conveniently selected and fit-for-purpose property photo gallery can be a driving factor for guests choosing their next place to stay. To help you with your photo gallery, we put together this set of guidelines:
- Keep photos travel-related and useful to guests:
Choose photos that show your property's most relevant features to set accurate expectations for potential guests, such as:
- Facilities and services available at your property
- Decor, location, and surroundings
- Your security features
- Demonstrable cleanliness measures in place, both at the room- and property-level
- Global, regional, and local cleanliness or safety badges, logos, watermarks, certificates in any local language or English, whether issued by government agencies or by industry certification bodies
- Regional and local logos, badges, watermarks, vouchers, and certificates related to COVID-19 government recovery policies in any local language or English
- If applicable, your Booking.com awards
Note: We’ll remove all photos that contain promotional info that encourages direct contact and direct booking. This includes photos about rates, discounts, services, or property contact info such as email addresses, phone numbers, websites, or QR codes.
- Always be appropriate for a global audience:
Help your future guests get the most out of your property photos by featuring quality content that’s appropriate for our global audience. We’ll remove photos that depict unlawful content, illicit materials, and graphic violence.
We’ll also remove all photos depicting or indicating discrimination on any grounds, profanity, indecent nudity of subjects regardless of their age, and sexually implicit or explicit content depicting subjects in the frame.
Last, we’ll remove any photos that depict misleading info that could harm guests’ health and safety, or breach our animal welfare standards.
- Be yourself – original and genuine:
Only upload photos you’re entitled to use, either because you took them yourself, received official permission from the photographer, or bought the rights to use them on our platform.
Refrain from using images for which your property doesn’t own the copyright. This is illegal, and any photos uploaded without proper permission, licensing, or copyrights will be removed either automatically by our moderation colleagues or at the request of the owner(s) of the photos you uploaded.
- Be respectful of people’s privacy:
Photos of your property are more helpful to potential guests than photos of a person’s private info, so always refrain from using photos that include any personal data.
Personal data in this context can mean photos taken with surveillance devices depicting guests located in areas of your property where people have reasonable expectations of privacy (e.g. bathrooms, bedrooms, changing rooms, saunas).
Note: Any and all photos taken under such circumstances that are uploaded without the explicit permission of the people depicted will be removed at their request.
Based on our Property Photo Moderation Guidelines, the below table provides an accurate understanding of what is and isn’t allowed when it comes to photography.
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Relevant examples that we’ve found include: Image |
Relevant examples that we’ve found include: Image |
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Do |
Do not |
Relevant examples that we’ve found include: Image
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Relevant examples that we’ve found include: Image
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Do |
Do not |
Relevant examples that we’ve found include: Image
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Relevant examples that we’ve found include: Image |
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Do |
Do not |
Relevant examples that we’ve found include: Image |
Relevant examples that we’ve found include: Image
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Tip: Not sure what photo to choose? Ask other property owners for advice by starting a conversation in the Partner Community.
Many of our most active partners in the Community have been running properties for years and have achieved some high scores. This is your chance to learn from the best.
Best practices
Using info taken from our ongoing research, we’ve created property or hotel photography guidelines to provide suggestions on taking the perfect photo – and the optimal number of hotel or rental property images that attract more guests and increase bookings.
What photos do I need for my hotel?
What photos do I need for my home, apartment, or vacation rental?
What photos do I need to attract more families to my property?
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Your Property Page Content
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- How do I create the perfect property page?
- How to change or update your property address
- Adding, changing, and updating my contact details
- Changing your property description
- How can I update my property's facilities?
- How can I add information to “The fine print?”
- How can I change information about my internet connection?
- How to rename your property listing title
- How do I change my position on the map?
- Letting guests know when a facility is temporarily closed
- All you need to know about quality ratings
- How do I get my property’s coordinates from Google Maps?
- How do I show guests what I do to protect them from the coronavirus?
- Updating your sustainability practices
- Guest Q&A feature
- Displaying cleanliness measures
- What is the Work-Friendly Program?
- How to update check-in services
- Optimizing the traveler search experience to boost visibility
- Using the room/unit differentiation tool to generate more high-value bookings
- Updating your swimming pool facility details
- Updating your property page
- Travel Sustainable: FAQs
- Room or unit differentiation tool: FAQs
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- What photos do I need for my home, apartment or vacation rental?
- What photos do I need to attract more families to my property?
- What photos do I need for my hotel?
- What are guest-generated photos?
- How do I add, change, and update my property photos?
- How do I rotate photos?
- Why are some photos not showing on my page?
- How to take better photos of your property
- How can I add photos of specific rooms or units?
- How do I tag my photos?
- Understanding the smart ordering feature
- How can I change my main photo?
- How do I change the order of my photos?
- How can I delete a photo?