REA and Domain Image Specs: Get Them Right or Get Cropped

You can shoot the best photos in the suburb and still have them let down by the upload. Realestate.com.au and Domain both crop, compress, and reformat what you give them. If your images are not built for those rules, the portals make the decision for you, and they are not gentle about it.

Here is how to make sure your listings look as good on the portals as they do in the gallery you approved.

The portals crop, whether you like it or not

Both REA and Domain display images in their own shapes across search results, the listing page, and the app. Feed them an oddly proportioned or low-resolution file and they crop to fit, often straight through the part of the photo that mattered. The hero shot you chose can lose its sky, its foreground, or its framing in a thumbnail.

The fix is not complicated, but it has to happen before upload, not after.

What to get right

• Aspect ratio. Export with the portals' landscape framing in mind, and leave a little breathing room so a crop does not clip the subject.
• Resolution. Upload high-resolution files. The portals downscale far better than they upscale. Small files look soft on a phone and worse on a TV.
• File size and format. Standard JPEGs, sensibly compressed. Huge files get re-compressed hard. Tiny ones were already too far gone.
• Image order. The first image earns the click in search. Lead with the hero, not the bathroom.
• Consistency. Same colour grade and exposure across the set. One mismatched photo makes the whole listing look amateur.

Why this is a photographer's job, not yours

You should not be resizing files at 9pm before a launch. A photographer who shoots real estate every day already exports to suit the portals, hands you web-optimised versions, and orders the gallery so the strongest image leads. That is part of the deliverable, not an extra.

When we deliver a shoot, you get files ready for REA and Domain, sized and ordered, plus high-resolution versions for print and social. You upload and move on. See how delivery works as part of a full shoot on our services page.

The quiet cost of getting it wrong

A cropped hero. A soft thumbnail. A listing where image three is brighter than image two. None of it is fatal on its own. Together they whisper to a buyer that the campaign was rushed, and that whisper sticks to the property and to the agent.

Good photos deserve a clean upload. Get the specs right and the portals show your work the way you intended, not the way an algorithm decided.

Want listings that look right on every portal? Get in touch and we will handle the shoot and the specs.