People working on Real Estate manage pictures of properties every day. They take, organize, send, etc … pictures for clients, collaborators, etc… And with the boom of digital photography almost every Real Estate agency has an superb camera able to take pictures at 5, 7, 10 o more megapixels.

Many megapixels means bigger photos, bigger files but absolutely not better photos.

Did you know that:

  • A super big picture is NOT going to print better than an right-sized one on your printer (at least that you want to print a huge panel for placing on the road)
  • A super big picture is NOT going to be seen better than an right-sized one on a computer screen (you have to resize it to see the whole picture, true?)
  • If you want to amaze a potential purchaser by sending incredible high resolution pictures of a property, what you probably are doing is blocking your email sends for some time and clogging their email because of the big attachments. And sometimes, the email will not even reach them because they use an email account on Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail.
  • Your “Sent” folder is going to be huge. So huge that your email client is going to get slower and slower and finally crash (specially Outlook) letting you on the phone with your IT people.
  • Your going to need more hard disk space, more backup space, more IT people work hours, etc …

Definitively, you need high-quality pictures but right sized for your needs. Have a chat with your IT people and ask them what is the right size.

If you use a real estate software for managing your properties portfolio it probably has a built in functionality to resize and store the properties images for you. Ask your software vendor about where they are stored and how to access them in case that you need them. For example, our Real Estate Software - Inmoba Property Manager, resizes automatically the property pictures, archive the original ones (if you want), makes web thumbnails, etc … and everything is stored in a shared folder and organized by property references so it is easy to access and use them.

If you are alone or the pictures are not related with any property, there is a little (and free) tool for Windows XP, named Image Resizer (from Microsoft PowerToys) that everybody working with images on real estate should have installed on their computer. It provides the ability to resize one or multiple pictures to an specified size with just two clicks. Here you have a guide on how to use it. Simple, free and will save you many hours of image resizing in Photoshop or any other.

Hope it helps.