Cool Tools and Hot Hacks for Photos Every Agent Will Love!

High-quality photos for your listings, promotional activities, website, and social media are crucial. They help appeal to your audience, sell properties faster, and gain more listings in the future. However, even if you have the right photo, you may benefit more if you also know how to fine-tune them.

Some edits you can make to increase the impact of a photo include correcting color or image brightness, resizing your image, and removing an unnecessary background. Plus, to manage the size of the space that photos consume on your laptop or desktop, you can use a handy tool to delete duplicates automatically.

Best of all, you don't have to use expensive software like Adobe Photoshop or be an image editing expert. Happily, we've found that the following excellent tools and hacks can assist an agent even with limited tech skills.

Removing Image Background

Have you ever seen a headshot of someone with an all-white background? It's probably the most popular hack for professional photos. And did you know you can remove an image's background and make the focus just on the subject by turning the background white? It's a great way to make a headshot easier to use and stand out more.

The coolest tool to do this is remove.bg. This background removal tool instantly removes a photo's background in just five seconds and zero clicks. Remove.bg will save you a significant amount of time versus trying to accomplish the same thing with other photo editing applications. Click on the "Upload Image" button on the site or drop a photo in the tool's box, and the background is automatically removed for you and ready to download and use.

Remove.bg can help you create more engaging images, bringing a professional quality to your photos. And if you use Adobe Photoshop, remove.bg also is fully integrated and can speed up your workflow in fixing images. Best of all, remove.bg offers a free plan. They also provide a subscription plan if you need to remove more than a handful of backgrounds. Prices range from 23 to 11 cents per image, depending on how many credits you purchase a month.

A reminder to not go too far with Photoshopping with listing photos: NAR states, "Don't retouch pictures to cover up significant property imperfections or repair issues; doing so could violate the REALTORS® Code of Ethics." So while brightness, color correction, making sure images are vertically aligned, or removing a trash can from a driveway are edits that can be done to listing photos, be careful not to misrepresent the property.

Resizing Photos

Having the right size for your photos can make all the difference in maximizing the effectiveness of your image. Often when you reduce the size of a photo to save space, you lose quality. One such photo editing hack that helps you avoid that is BeFunky, a nifty creative platform that allows you quickly resize the photo, reduce its data size, and maintain a high-quality image – for free. When emailing an image to a client, having a small file size will save the hassle of waiting on a large download. Some email providers also have limits to the size of the files you can send. BeFunky's resize tool helps you change the image's file size without cutting anything out or decreasing the quality of the image. It also allows photo adjustment for your blog or website if needed.

Editing Photos

There are many potential online and offline choices for what you need in photo editing. For example, GIMP is a free, open-source photo editor available for Windows and Mac and allows high-quality photo editing. Adobe also offers a free web application called Adobe Spark to remove photo backgrounds and resize images. Furthermore, it also provides unique hacks, such as converting JPGs into PNGs and vice versa, which comes in handy if a client requires a specific type of photo from you.

Remove Duplicate Photos

While you may need to temporarily keep several variations of the same photo for your listing or website, eventually, you may want to remove the duplicates because they drain storage space. You can download a free tool called Duplicate & Similar Photo Cleaner if you own a Windows computer. This software scans all photos stored on your device and auto-selects similar images across multiple formats, along with similar ones that may have been edited. This allows you to delete the photos you want gone in one go, saving you space and time in searching for duplicates.

If you have a Mac device, you are in luck, as you don't need a particular program, just follow the instructions that MacKeeper provides. Or, you may also download the Mackeeper app, click on the Duplicates Finder from the sidebar, hit the Start Scan button. Then it will locate all the images that are similar to the originals. Then, select the remove duplicates option, and you will be all set.

Remember, if you need any assistance on editing images or figuring out photo editing software, Tech Helpline is here to help, only a click, call or email away.

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