Why the photos decide who comes
People find estate sales by scrolling through listings on their phones, usually on a Wednesday or Thursday evening, deciding which two or three of a dozen sales are worth a Saturday morning. They do not read the description first. They look at the cover photo, and if it holds them, they swipe through the rest, and somewhere around the tenth picture they have decided. A sale with six dim photos of a living room loses to a sale with sixty clear ones, whatever is actually in the house.
That is why the free listing at list your own sale takes up to 200 photos, and why it is worth using a good share of them. The photos are the listing. The description tells people the dates and the rules; the photos tell them whether to come. Our guide to listing your own estate sale online covers the rest of the listing, and this one is only about the pictures.
You do not need a camera, a light or any experience. You need an afternoon, a phone with a clean lens, a house that has been tidied for the purpose, and a plan for what to shoot in what order. The plan is most of it.
What to photograph first
Start with the things people will drive across a county for, because those are the photos that make a dealer or a collector put your sale at the top of the list. Every house is different, but the categories that pull people in are fairly consistent, and the guide to what sells best at estate sales goes through them in detail.
- Tools and the garage. A workbench, a wall of hand tools, power tools with their cases, a lathe or a table saw. Photograph the whole bench, then the good pieces individually.
- Furniture with a name or a period. Mid-century pieces, solid wood case furniture, anything with a maker's label. Shoot the piece from the front, then the label.
- Sterling, jewelry and coins, in a group shot on a plain cloth, then individually if there is anything notable. Do this on the day and keep the items locked away between times.
- Vintage kitchenware: colored mixing bowls, enameled cast iron, old glassware, a full set of anything. Collectors search listings for these by name.
- Collections of any kind, shown as a collection. Forty figurines on one shelf is one photo, and it tells a collector more than forty separate ones.
- Art, records, books, cameras, sewing machines, musical instruments, and any category the house has a lot of.
If you are not sure whether something belongs in this group, the guide to how to find out if something is valuable shows how to check quickly. A photo of the maker's mark on the bottom of a piece often does the checking for you: someone who knows will see it and come.
Room shots and detail shots
Once the leaders are done, work through the house room by room, and take two kinds of photo in each.
A room shot is taken from the doorway or a corner, showing as much of the room as the phone can fit. Its job is to say "this is how much there is" and to let a shopper spot things you did not think to photograph. One or two per room is enough; a third from the opposite corner if the room is large.
A detail shot is one thing, or one group of like things, filling the frame. A dresser. A shelf of glassware. The contents of one kitchen cabinet with the door open. The linen closet with the stacks visible. A rack of coats. For furniture, a second detail shot of the label, the drawer joints or the back is what a knowledgeable buyer wants to see, and it costs you ten seconds.
Do not skip the parts of the house that seem too ordinary to bother with. Someone is looking for exactly the everyday things: a good vacuum, a set of pots, garden tools, folding chairs, a working freezer. A single photo of each is enough, and it can be the reason a person decides the trip is worth it.
Light, camera and angles
Nearly every bad estate sale photo has the same problem, which is that the room was dark and the phone tried to fix it. The fixes are simple and free.
- Shoot in daylight, with every curtain and blind open. Late morning and early afternoon are best; the light is even and comes through the windows rather than the door.
- Turn on every lamp and overhead light as well. It fills the shadows and shows that the lamps work.
- Do not use the flash. It flattens furniture, bounces off glass and mirrors, and makes wood look cheap. If a room is too dark without it, wait for a brighter hour or bring a lamp in from another room.
- Wipe the lens. A phone that has been in a pocket all day has a film on it that turns every photo into a soft haze. This one step improves more photos than any other.
- Hold the phone sideways for rooms and furniture. Listing pages are wider than they are tall, and a landscape photo fills the space. Portrait is fine for a tall bookcase or a single standing lamp.
- Stand at the height of the thing you are shooting. Furniture is photographed from roughly the height of its top surface, not from standing height looking down. Small items on a table are shot from slightly above, or straight on at table level.
- Watch for yourself. Mirrors, glass cabinet doors and the screen of a television will show you and the phone. Step to one side.
- Tap to focus on the item, not the wall behind it, and hold still for a moment after the tap.
Take two of everything that matters and delete the worse one. Storage is free and a second try costs nothing on the day, while a blurry photo of the best thing in the house cannot be retaken once the sale is on.
Staging before you shoot
The house should be photographed after it has been set up for the sale, not before. That means the same work you would do for the sale itself, done a day or two early. Our guide to preparing a house for an estate sale covers the whole job, but for the photos specifically:
- Clear the floor of boxes and bags. A room shot of a room you cannot walk through says "hoarded" to a stranger even when it is not.
- Group like with like. All the glassware on one table, all the tools on the bench, all the linens on one bed. It photographs better and it is how the sale should be laid out anyway.
- Wipe surfaces, dust the tops of furniture and clean the glass in cabinet doors. Dust shows in daylight.
- Take out the trash, the empty boxes, the pile of newspapers and the dead plants.
- Remove anything that is not for sale, and anything the family is keeping. If it is in a photo, someone will ask for it, and a few will be annoyed when it is not there.
- Put the bathroom lid down, make the beds if the bedding is for sale, and shut closet doors unless the closet contents are on offer.
Use a plain cloth for small things
A sheet or a tablecloth in a single color, laid over a table by a window, turns a phone photo of jewelry, silver, coins or figurines into something a buyer can actually see. Patterned tablecloths and busy carpets swallow small objects.
The order of the photos
Listing pages show photos in the order you upload them, and the order is a piece of persuasion. Think of it as a story you are telling to somebody who may stop reading at any moment.
- The cover photo is the single best thing in the house, or the single best room if there is no standout item. It should be sharp, bright and landscape. This one photo appears in the browse results next to every other sale that weekend, and it is doing more work than the other 199 put together.
- The next eight or ten are the leaders from the first section above: the categories that make dealers and collectors mark the sale. Mix them. A tool photo, then a piece of furniture, then the glassware, then the jewelry, so a scroller sees the range of the sale in the first screen.
- Then room by room, each room's wide shot followed by its details, in a walking order through the house: living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, basement, garage, yard. A shopper who follows this is taking a tour.
- The everyday things last. Cleaning supplies, folding tables, the plastic storage bins. They belong in the listing, because somebody wants them, but nobody should have to swipe past them to reach the good furniture.
One category rarely earns more than a handful of photos. Forty pictures of dishes, one plate at a time, will lose a shopper before they reach the tools. Show the set, show the mark, move on.
Captions, and what should never be in a photo
A caption is a sentence, not a paragraph. Say what the thing is, the maker if you know it, a size where it matters, and the condition, honestly: "Oak dresser, five drawers, about 60 inches wide, one drawer sticks." Buyers search listings for words, so the maker's name and the type of thing belong in the caption, not just in the photo. Do not caption a room shot with an inventory; let the picture do it.
Prices in captions are a choice. A price on the best pieces can bring buyers who would otherwise not risk the drive, and it stops the same question arriving thirty times by message. A price in a photo also commits you to it, and a listed price that turns out to be wrong will be quoted back to you at the door. If you are unsure, leave prices off and describe the item well; the guide to what common household items sell for gives ranges to work from.
Some things must stay out of every photo, however good the picture is.
Keep these out of the frame
The house number, the street sign, mail with a name and address, family photographs on the wall, prescription bottles, a computer screen, a wall calendar with appointments, the alarm panel, a safe, and the view from a window that identifies the street. Sale pages on this site hide the street address until 24 hours before the sale by default, and a photo of the front porch with the number on it undoes that in one tap. The guide to estate sale security explains why an empty house that a whole town can find is a problem.
Photograph inside the house, and if you want an exterior shot, take it of the garage contents with the door up, or of the backyard, never of the front from the street.
The mistakes that cost the most
- Too few photos. Six pictures of a full house says the family did not care, and shoppers read it that way.
- Dark, yellow, blurry. Open the curtains, wipe the lens, hold still.
- The same item from five angles while the rest of the room is missing. Two angles at most, then move on.
- A cover photo of a hallway. Lead with the best thing you have.
- Photographing the mess and captioning it "lots more". Nobody drives for "lots more". Tidy, group, then shoot.
- Flattering the truth. A close-up that hides the water ring, a caption that calls plate "silver". The buyer finds out at the sale, in front of everyone, and leaves. Honest photos bring the people who actually want what you have.
- Forgetting the garage, the basement and the yard. These are often where the most searched-for things live, and they are the rooms most families skip.
What to do next
Set the house up, pick an afternoon with good light, and shoot in the order above. Then create the listing at list your own sale, free, with its own page and room for up to 200 photos, and check how it looks beside the other sales on the browse page for your area. If the whole job is more than you want to take on, describe the estate once and local companies will reach out to you, free. For everything after the photos, the guide to running your own estate sale covers the sale days, and advertising an estate sale yourself covers the signs and the listing text.
Frequently asked questions
How many photos should an estate sale listing have?
As many as it takes to show every room and every category of item clearly, which for an ordinary full house is usually somewhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty. More photos of distinct things is better; more photos of the same thing is not. The free listing on this site allows up to 200.
Should I put prices in estate sale photos?
It is optional, and it cuts both ways. A price on the best pieces can bring buyers who would not risk the drive and stops the same question arriving by message, but a listed price is one you will be held to at the door. If you are unsure of a price, describe the item well and leave the number off.
Do I need a real camera to photograph an estate sale?
No. Any recent phone takes a better photo than most listings show, provided the lens is wiped, the curtains are open, the flash is off and you hold still. Light and tidiness matter far more than the camera.
Should I photograph everything in the house?
Every room and every category, yes; every single object, no. Take a wide shot of each room, then a photo of each group of like items, and individual photos only of the pieces that would make someone come on their own. Forty photos of individual plates lose shoppers before they reach the furniture.
Should estate sale photos show the outside of the house?
Not the front, and never the house number or the street sign. The address on a sale page here is hidden until 24 hours before the sale by default, and a photo of the porch defeats that. If you want an exterior shot, photograph the open garage or the backyard items.