Airbnb and Booking.com photos: how to take them for a B&B or holiday home

Anyone looking for a room for the weekend looks for it from the sofa, phone in hand, thumb scrolling. Each listing gets the time of one photo, sometimes two. If the first shows a blurred bed and the corner of a wardrobe, the thumb moves on and your room is never even opened.

That photo, though, also makes a promise, and the guest checks it the moment the door opens: the bed is where they saw it and the room is as wide as it looked. You have put money and effort into those rooms, and now you have to let people see them. Photos for Airbnb and Booking.com are made with these two moments in mind, the thumb and the door.

Below you will find how to take them, with the figures taken from the partner page of Booking and from the Resource Center of Airbnb, up to date as of November 2026. The platforms change their rules from time to time, so check the official pages before you upload.

How many photos do you need for an Airbnb or Booking.com listing?

Booking asks for at least 10 photos of the property and, for each room or unit, at least 4 photos plus 1 of the bathroom. Airbnb is less demanding: 5 photos are enough to start, and you add the others later. These are minimums, and in a B&B with three rooms the sum climbs fast: on Booking that is already 12 photos of the rooms and 3 of the bathrooms, before you get to the façade and the breakfast room.

Airbnb suggests making a list of shots for each room, from several points of view, alternating wide, mid-distance and close-up photos. Write it before you start, so you do not find out halfway through the afternoon that you have not a single photo of the bathroom. Among the shots to plan is the one that shows how to get in: at B&B Nimbus in Naples the ROOM 3 plaque and the keypad reader sit beside the half-open door, with the bed just visible behind.

Which photo should go first?

The first photo is the one the thumb sees in the search results, so choose your best room, the one you would stop in front of yourself. Airbnb crops photos to a square: keep the subject, usually the bed, in the centre of the frame.

On Airbnb the photo tour sorts the photos by room on its own, and you can move them, remove them and add more. Captions are there to say what the photo does not show: Airbnb gives the example of the table that extends to seat 10.

What size should photos for Airbnb and Booking.com be?

Booking asks for at least 2048 x 1080 pixels, ideally 4000 x 3000, and for landscape shots only, because that way the photos look better on the platform. Airbnb starts from 1200 x 800 pixels, with files up to about 10 megabytes, again in landscape. Shoot at the maximum resolution of your phone or camera.

Is a phone enough to photograph a B&B?

Both platforms say a smartphone is fine, as long as it has a good camera. With a phone you can take honest photos, and sometimes they are enough.

In a narrow room the temptation is to widen it with the phone’s wider lens. The room looks bigger, but the guest notices as soon as they walk in, and a photo far from the real room brings disappointed reviews. Booking too asks you to avoid extreme wide angles and fisheye. Shoot from the corner of the room; Booking suggests a height of roughly 90 to 150 centimetres (3 to 5 feet). Hold the phone straight: door frames and walls that lean make a well-kept room look neglected.

The lamps at home and the window give off light of different colours and the phone mixes them as best it can, so white sheets come out yellow on one side and blue on the other. Airbnb recommends flash off, curtains open and lamps on only if the photo is still too dark; Booking wants them on. Try both versions and keep the one in which the whites stay white.

In front of a mirror a single step to the side is enough for whoever is shooting to appear in the frame, so look into it before you press the button. Leave filters, HDR and saturated colours alone, and do not use artificial intelligence to correct what is wrong in the room: Airbnb asks you to remove content retouched to hide flaws or damage.

How do you prepare the house before photographing it?

When I look at a room I am about to photograph, I notice at once what no longer means anything to someone who walks through it every day: a cable on the floor, a closed curtain. Before shooting, go through each room with this list:

• Beds freshly made, sheets taut, no linen in sight.
• Floors clean, surfaces tidy, wires and cables out of the frame.
• Curtains open.
• Shower and bath spotless, shower curtain open, toilet lid closed.
• No toilet paper, tissues or bins in sight.
• Outside, no parked cars or road signs in the frame.
• If you offer tea, coffee or bathrobes, put them where the photo can see them.

This is how a room looks when the list is done. At B&B Linda Blue Bay in Piano di Sorrento the open curtains show the balcony beyond the French window, and the white bathrobe is in the wardrobe, where the guest will find it.

When is it worth calling a photographer?

The phone reaches its limit with dark or narrow rooms and with difficult colours. It also shows with many rooms that have to look like part of the same house, and when the photos are needed for the website and for print as well.

Then there are the cases where the photos alone are not enough. For Villa Dequinz the client was about to launch a holiday-home business and wanted content for the booking channels, for their own website and for social media: the result was interior photos, a virtual tour, FPV drone footage inside the house and video.

If your rooms fall within these limits and you are looking for a B&B photographer in Naples or in another city, have the house ready before the photographer arrives: clean and tidy. Allow two to four hours, depending on the services chosen. I can adjust a few details for the framing, but not tidy an entire property, and if the house is not ready the time of the shoot is lost.

The same photos can go on Airbnb, Booking, your website and social media, as long as they carry no platform logos or lettering and the licence covers these uses. Which uses it covers is decided in the quote and written into the contract. Booking warns that photos uploaded without the rights risk being removed.

I do not have a price list: the quote depends mostly on the services chosen.

In a few weeks someone will open the door of your room with the phone still in their hand and check whether the bed is where they saw it in the first photo.

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Written byGiulio Palumbo SchiavonePhotographer and director. ENAC-certified drone operator and Google-certified photographer. I work across Italy and abroad for architecture studios, construction firms, hotels and companies.About →