Taking Wide Angle Photos Can Make for Bad MLS Photos - Here's How to Avoid Distorion

You've seen MLS photos shot with a wide angle lens like (like the ones below). It's probably a good photo, but, not in the form it gets uploaded to in the MLS. Typically, they get mashed (technical term) in from the left and the right until the picture looks stretched tall. Very bad image from a consumer perspective to say the least and wide angle photos really do make for better shots of rooms than a regular width photo. There is a simple way to avoid this, get your full width and not worry about the MLS screwing up what would otherwise be much better pictures of your listing and you can do it for free. Below, are two photos, one mashed up the way that the MLS would make it look and the other is the way it was intended to look and a wide angle should be considered mandatory if you want to get a real picture of a room. Below the photos, I'll show you how to make sure you don't have to crop off the left and right and avoid getting your photo mashed together by the fixed width mandated by most MLS's. First, with full width:

Now, these are large and you can see the distortion, but, it's even worse on the thumbnails consumers view.  Most MLS systems will accept images with a 640 X 480 px and this is the information we need to make our photos look good.

Here is What You Need to do

Bring your photos home or to the office and edit them for color corrections, etc...once you have them correct, resize your MLS photos to a width of 640 pixels and let the height be less than the 480 pixels (whatever it is when you make the width 640 pixels). If you upload wide angle shots at this point, it's exactly how you can end up width warped photos. The solution is to place your wide angled shot on a white background with a width of 640 pixels and a height of 480 pixels. That way your width to height ratio will be correct.

You can do this with lots of programs. I prefer to use paint.net (not to be confused with MS Paint). Paint.net is a free program for Windows - let's call it a baby Photoshop. It's got lots of great features, but I digress. If you don't have paint.net, use MS Publisher or any other program where you can create a background that is 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels high. Overlay your image on top of the background, center it vertically (it should reach the edge on the left and the right), combine the background and the image and you're done. Below is how it would look. I'm using a grey background instead of white so that you can see it.

How to do This in MS Publisher

Open a document, Insert a text box, make the width 640 X 480. To do this - click insert, then text box, drop the text box on the page, right click while hovering over the text box and click format text box. Change the width and height. Then, make the background of your text box white, insert your photo on the page, drag it over your text box, combine the white text box and the image - hover over the text box and left click one time then hover over the image and left click while holding control. You should see a little box at the bottom of your text box and image. When you hover over it, it will say group objects. Click it one time to group the objects. Now you need to repeat the steps to select the background and the image again and then right click "save as picture". Make sure you save it at 96 DPI. You are done!

That's all you need to do get the correct aspect ratio for your box. When you upload the photo, it won't readjust the width or hight when it inserts it.

Other Times You Might Use This

The only other time that you might need to create a background would be if you had to crop a photo in a funny way. Anytime that you change the aspect ratio from 640 X 480, your photo is going to get distorted when it is uploaded. To avoid this, just add a background and you're all set.

Taking great photos is something that you should try to do if you list homes. It's just one of the very basic aspects of our job that we sometimes take for granted. Perhaps it's because most other homes have very average photos. Don't be average.

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