Property photography
Real estate contact sheets
Turn a listing shoot into one labelled page an agent can pick from in ten minutes. Both property layouts open the normal editor with the grid, labels, and page details already set, and every setting stays adjustable.
Property listing
Three across on landscape pages, cropped to a consistent size so every room reads at a glance.
Property contact sheet
A dense grid of every frame from the shoot, for picking the listing set with an agent.
Shooting something other than property? See all contact sheet templates.
Why property shoots need a contact sheet
A listing shoot produces far more frames than the listing needs: four angles of every room, two of them at different exposures, plus the exterior in three lights. Somebody — the agent, the vendor, or a marketing coordinator — has to choose twenty of them, and they are not a photographer.
Sending 180 files makes that person's job impossible. One labelled page per shoot, ordered room by room, makes it a ten-minute task they can do on a phone between viewings. That is the entire argument for contact sheets in property work, and it is why agents who have been sent one rarely go back to a folder link.
Two layouts, two jobs
Property work needs both, and they are not interchangeable.
- Property contact sheet — a dense 4 × 6 portrait grid of every frame from the shoot, filenames on, frame numbers on. This is the working document: the agent marks the frames they want and sends back the numbers.
- Property listing — three across on landscape pages, cropped to a consistent size. This is the presentation document: the shortlist, in order, for the vendor or the portal upload.
Shoot, deliver the contact sheet, get the picks back, then deliver the listing sheet from the selects. Two documents, one workflow, no email thread about which kitchen shot they meant.
Name the rooms, not the frames
This is the single thing that makes a property contact sheet work, and most photographers skip it. DSC_4471.jpg under a photograph of a kitchen tells the agent nothing. 12-hartley-rd-kitchen-04.jpg tells them the address, the room, and which of the kitchen frames it is.
Rename the set before you lay it out — the batch file renamer does it in the browser in about a minute — then turn on filenames in the sheet. The agent can now say "kitchen 04, lounge 02, garden 01" in a text message and you know exactly what they mean.
What to put on the page
- The address in the header. You will shoot four properties this week. So will they.
- The date in the footer. It settles which shoot a sheet belongs to when a property is relisted in six months.
- Frame numbers, so a reply can be three numbers rather than three sentences.
- A watermark if the vendor has not paid yet — corner, low opacity. There is a guide to watermarking proofs.
- 150dpi export. Agents open these on a phone. A 40MB PDF helps nobody.
Common questions
- What is a real estate contact sheet?
- A single labelled page showing every frame from a property shoot, ordered room by room, so an agent or vendor can choose the listing set without opening every file. It is usually followed by a second, sparser sheet presenting the chosen images.
- How many photos should a property contact sheet have per page?
- Around 24 on a 4 × 6 portrait grid. That is dense enough to fit a whole shoot on one or two pages and large enough that a room is still recognisable, which is all an agent needs to pick from.
- How should I name real estate photo files?
- Address, then room, then a padded sequence number — for example 12-hartley-rd-kitchen-04.jpg. Lowercase with hyphens, so the names sort correctly and survive being uploaded to any portal.
