One photo set for your website, Autotrader, Cars.com and Facebook: how to shoot once and list everywhere
Every listing site crops, orders and limits photos differently. How to build one set of car photos that works on your own website and every marketplace, with the right photo in the first slot every time.
The same car, four different frames
A dealer listing a car today pushes the same photos to their own website, to one or two national marketplaces, to Facebook Marketplace and often to a group site. Each one shows the photos differently. One crops to a wide box, one to a square thumbnail, one shows the first photo large and the rest as a strip, one caps the number of photos. A set that was shot for one of them looks wrong on the others.
The fix is not to shoot four sets. It is to shoot one set that survives every crop and every limit.
Shoot landscape, with room around the car
Landscape suits every listing site, because cars are wide and the main photo boxes are wide. Leave a margin of roughly a tenth of the frame all round the car, so a site that crops to a square or a slightly different ratio does not lose a bumper. Phones default to portrait; turn the phone sideways for the listing set and keep a few upright frames for social posts. Our post on portrait vs. landscape goes into this.
Check each site's limits once, then forget about them
Marketplaces publish their own photo specifications and they change from time to time: a minimum size (full HD landscape is a safe floor), accepted file types, a maximum file size, and a cap on the number of photos per listing. Some national sites allow thirty or more; some show only the first handful in search results. Look up the current limits for each site you use in its dealer help centre, write them on the wall of the photo area, and build your set so the best photos fall inside the smallest cap.
The first slot is the whole game
Whatever else a site does, it shows the first photo in search results. That single image decides whether the listing is opened at all. Make it the front three-quarter, clean and consistent, every time. Dealers on industry forums recommend a fixed photo order partly for this reason: when the sequence is always the same, the first slot is always the hero and the interior always lands in the same place, whichever site is showing it.
A fixed order that works everywhere
Front three-quarter. Side. Rear three-quarter. Front. Rear. Wheel. Dashboard with ignition on. Front seats. Rear seats. Boot. Odometer. Engine bay. Then the flaws. If a site caps you at nine or ten, the buyer still gets the outside, the inside and the mileage. If it allows thirty, the extra detail shots and close-ups go at the end. Our twelve-angle list has the detail.
More is not always better
In 2015 Automotive News reported on a study by the data firm CarStory which found that listings with around nine photos generated more leads than those with twenty or thirty, and described the drop-off as image fatigue. The study is a decade old and came from a vendor, so take the exact numbers lightly, but the lesson is sound: a long set of repetitive, weak photos is worse than a short set of good ones. If a photo does not show something new, leave it out. See our post on how many photos a listing needs.
One background means one brand everywhere
The thing buyers notice across sites is whether your cars look like they belong to the same dealer. A car shot in the rain on your website and the same car shot at dusk on a marketplace, because somebody reshot it, reads as two different businesses. A studio booth fixes this at the source: every car goes into the same booth, the finished set is pushed to every channel, and whichever site a buyer finds you on, they see the same lot.
A checklist for the photo station
Phone sideways. Margin around the car. Same twelve angles in the same order, hero first. Full-size files, not screenshots. Booth applied to the exterior set. One upload, every channel. The current photo caps for each site taped to the wall.