Photos on Airbnb-style marketplaces, where hosts upload their own
On a marketplace where hosts or sellers upload their own photos, your team does not take the pictures, so quality changes from one listing to the next. What the marketplace can do is publish clear photo guidance, find the listings that fall short, and lead each listing with the best photo its host already uploaded.
What Airbnb tells its hosts
Airbnb's own guide for hosts is a good model for any marketplace built on uploaded photos:[1]
- Clean and declutter the space before taking photos.
- Use soft natural light: open the blinds and turn off the flash.
- Take horizontal photos, because search results crop images into squares and listing pages show photos in landscape.
- Center the subject and shoot straight ahead, without tilting the lens up or down.
- Upload photos of at least 1200 by 800 pixels.
The same checks, across a whole catalog
Those tips line up with what Topit's free audit scores: lighting, sharpness, framing, clutter and clarity. The difference is scale. Instead of asking each host to review their own photos, the audit reads the public listing pages you name and shows which listings lead with a weaker photo than one the host already uploaded.
Lead with the host's best photo
Hosts often upload their best photo somewhere other than first. Moving it first uses a photo the host already chose to publish, so it needs no new upload and no reshoot.
Where no photo on a listing is strong, the report gives the reason, such as a dark room or a busy background, which you can pass to the host as a specific request.
Who this is for
Teams running marketplaces for short-term rentals, venues and spaces, experiences, services or second-hand goods: anywhere the photos come from the people listing.
Get a free audit of your listing photos
Topit's free listing photo audit scores up to 12 photos on each listing and shows which listings lead with a weaker photo than one they already have, with the reason for each pick. Free, with no account and no script.
Questions
Can the audit read listings on Airbnb itself?
The audit is for your own marketplace or store: you enter your site and listing pages on it. It reads only public listing pages, follows robots.txt, and goes one page at a time.
Do hosts need to do anything?
No. The free audit reads public listing pages. If you go on to the 30-day trial, your team adds one script to your listing pages; hosts do nothing.
What if a listing has no good photo?
The audit cannot create one. The report says why a photo scored low, such as poor lighting or a cluttered background, so you can ask the host for a specific reshoot.
Sources
- Airbnb Resource Center, How to take great photos for your listing (updated November 8, 2024; read October 21, 2026). www.airbnb.com/resources/hosting-homes/a/how-to-take-great-photos-for-your-listing-687
Airbnb is a trademark of Airbnb, Inc. Topit is not affiliated with Airbnb; this page quotes Airbnb's public guidance for hosts.