Photos that sell your rooms: a practical guide for B&B owners

Photos are the first thing a guest looks at and often the reason they book, or don’t. You don’t need a professional photographer to get good ones: a recent phone, daylight and a bit of method go a long way. This guide covers what to shoot, how, and how to use the pictures on your website without slowing it down.

What to shoot

Think of the questions a guest asks before booking, and answer each with a photo.

Photo	What it tells the guest
The outside of the house, in sunshine if you can	“This is the place, it looks cared for.” It also helps people find you on arrival.
Each room, from the doorway or a corner	The size, the beds, the light
The bathroom of each room	Shower or bath, clean and modern
Breakfast, as you actually serve it	One of the best reasons to choose a B&B
The view from the window or the garden	Why your place, not the one down the road
Common areas: lounge, dining room, garden	Room to relax
Parking, entrance, steps or ramp	Practical: luggage, access, mobility
The village, the beach, the walk nearby	Where guests will spend their day

Name each room the same way on every photo and every page: “Sea View Double” everywhere, not “Room 3” on one page and “the blue room” on another.

How to take them

• Daylight first. Shoot in the morning or early afternoon with every curtain open and every light on. Avoid the flash: it flattens the room and leaves hard shadows.
• Shoot from the doorway or a corner, at about chest height, holding the phone straight so the walls stay upright. A room photographed from a corner looks bigger and makes sense.
• Landscape, not portrait, for rooms and views: websites and booking engines mostly show wide pictures. Take a few portrait shots too, for phones and social media.
• Use the phone’s normal lens. The ultra-wide setting makes rooms look bigger than they are, and guests notice on arrival.
• Tidy, then tidy again. Make the beds with fresh linen, hide cables, bins, toiletries and personal items, close the toilet lid, straighten the towels.
• One idea per photo. A cup of tea on the window seat with the bay behind says more than a wide shot of everything.
• Keep it honest. Google asks for Business Profile photos that “represent reality”, with “no significant alterations or excessive use of filters”. Guests feel the same way: a room that looks smaller than in the photos costs you a review.

How to use them on your website

Keep the originals. Store the full-size files from your phone or camera, not copies downloaded from Facebook, WhatsApp or a booking platform, which are much smaller. A photo used across the full width of a screen needs to be large; when we rebuild a site, we ask for anything under about 1,200 pixels wide to be sent again in a bigger version.

Let the website make them light. Large photos are one of the most common reasons a site is slow on phones. A modern website resizes each photo for the screen it is shown on and serves it in a modern format (WebP or AVIF), so a sharp picture still loads quickly. Google’s advice on page speed focuses on the largest element in view when the page opens, which on most accommodation sites is the main photo. In our review of 21 Irish sites, 19 of the 20 we could measure took more than 2.5 seconds to show their main content on a phone, and heavy photos and sliders were among the usual causes. Our mobile speed guide shows how to check yours.

Give each photo a short description (the “alt text”). It is read aloud to blind visitors and helps Google understand the picture. Google’s example: “Dalmatian puppy playing fetch” is better than “puppy”, and much better than a list of keywords. For a B&B: “Sea View Double: king-size bed facing the window”. Purely decorative images get an empty description, as the W3C recommends.

Name the files sensibly. Google says a filename gives “very light clues” about the picture: sea-view-double.jpg rather than IMG_0423.JPG.

Put each photo next to the text it illustrates: the room photos on the room’s page, breakfast near the breakfast paragraph. Google’s image guidance recommends placing images “near relevant text”.

Skip the slider. A row of photos that slides by itself is slow, hard to use on a phone, and many visitors never see past the first picture. One strong photo at the top, then a gallery guests can scroll, works better.

Your Google Business Profile

Add the same photos to your free Google Business Profile. Google’s guidelines: JPG or PNG, between 10 KB and 5 MB, ideally 720 × 720 pixels or more, in focus and well lit. Add an outside photo so guests recognise the house when they arrive.

Who owns the photos?

• Photos you took yourself are yours to use.
• Photos taken by a photographer you paid usually remain theirs unless your agreement says otherwise. Ask for a written licence or assignment that covers your website, including any new website.
• Photos on your Booking.com, Airbnb or tourism-board listing may have been taken by someone working for that platform or organisation. Don’t copy them to your site without checking.
• People in your photos, including guests and staff, should agree to appear. Shots of empty rooms and of the house avoid the question.

A quick shot list

1. The house from outside, in good light.
2. Each room from the doorway or a corner, landscape, bed made.
3. Each bathroom.
4. Breakfast as you serve it.
5. The view, the garden, the lounge.
6. Parking and entrance.
7. Three or four photos of the area nearby.

Then keep the originals in one folder, named by room, ready for your website, your Google profile and your booking platforms.