How Should You Compress Photos for a Real Estate Listing?
A listing often has thirty or forty photos at several MB each straight off a phone, slow to upload and slow for buyers to open. Yet buyers zoom in on corners, floors, and window light, and over-compression makes them suspicious.
Where buyers zoom in
Listing photos carry decision information: layout, finishes, damp patches on walls, how much light a room gets. Buyers pinch-zoom on phones, so photos should not be shrunk too far — but nobody zooms to the original 4000px+, and those extra pixels only slow uploads and loading.
The hardest shots are window-plus-interior frames: bright outside, dim inside, and shadow detail is the first thing compression smears. Check those first when sampling results.
Suggested settings
| Image type | Preset | Longest edge | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interior and exterior photos | Balanced (JPEG quality 75) | 1920px | Enough for zooming |
| Backlit, window, night shots | High quality (JPEG quality 90) | 1920px | Preserves shadow detail |
| Floor plans | High quality | Original or 2560px | Thin lines and small text are sensitive; PNG is not quantized on High quality |
| Neighbourhood and amenities | Balanced | 1920px | Same as interiors |
Batch-processing a whole listing
- One folder per listing; floor plans can live in the same folder.
- Choose Balanced and longest edge 1920px, then drag the folder in. The tool runs up to 4 processing threads at once (2 on low-memory devices), so dozens of photos finish quickly.
- When done, switch to High quality and click "Recompress" on the floor plan and backlit cards to redo just those.
- Click "Download ZIP" to get the whole set with filenames unchanged, ready to upload in order.
Do not publish the address with the photos
Phone photos usually carry GPS coordinates precise to the building, and listing sites do not always strip them. tinysqueeze does not keep photo info by default, so the output has no GPS; even with "Keep photo info" checked, GPS location and serial numbers are always removed.
For rentals and owner-occupied homes, this keeps forwarded originals from revealing the exact location. The colour profile is kept, so cleaning the metadata does not shift colours.
Three checks before uploading
- Open two or three backlit photos on a phone and zoom in — are the shadows blotchy?
- Are the room names and areas on the floor plan legible?
- Is every file within the platform limit on its result card? Before switching an oversized file to Maximum, try longest edge 1280px instead.
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