Do you need one?
For a private sale, a video does two useful things. On the listing, a buyer who has opened it watches the car move before reading anything, and a car that looks the same in motion as in the photos is a car they trust. And in the messages, the first thing every buyer asks is whether it is still available, and the second is something the video answers: does it run, what does the inside look like, is that scratch bad. Sending the video with your reply saves the next three messages.
Reels and TikTok are a bonus. A private seller does not have a following, but a short clip of a clean car with the price on it does travel locally, and it costs nothing to post the same video there.
So yes, if it takes ten minutes. It should not take more than that, and everything below is arranged so it does not.
Two ways, and which one you want
You can film the car, or you can make a video from the photos of it. Filming shows the car moving and running, which is the thing photos cannot. Making it from the photos gives you a cleaner, steadier, better lit clip with no wind noise, because the photos were taken carefully and the walkaround was not.
The practical answer for most sellers is the photo version for the listing and the feed, because it looks better, and a separate short walkaround or cold start clip kept on your phone to send to a buyer who asks. If you only do one, do the photo version.
Filming a walkaround, step by step
Same conditions as the photos: the car washed and dry, parked somewhere plain with space around it, in shade or in the soft light of early morning or evening. Then:
- 01Wipe the lens. Hold the phone vertical. Use the normal 1x lens, not the wide one.
- 02Crouch to headlight height and keep the phone level. Start on the front three-quarter, the same angle as your cover photo, and hold still for two full seconds before you move.
- 03Walk one slow lap of the car, slower than feels natural, keeping the whole car in the frame. Do not zoom. Do not stop and start.
- 04Open the driver's door and film the seat and the door, then lean in for the dash with the ignition on so the screen and dials are lit, then the odometer close enough to read.
- 05Open a rear door for the back seat, then the trunk.
- 06Stop. That is thirty seconds. Do not narrate; the wind wins and most people watch with the sound off.
- 07Trim the first and last second where your hand moved, in the phone's own editor. Nothing else.
The cold start clip
Optional, and worth having on your phone rather than in the listing. Film the engine bay or the dash from outside the car, sound on, and have someone start it from cold. Ten seconds of it idling. When a buyer asks how it runs, send that. It answers the question better than any sentence and it shows you have nothing to hide about the one thing a listing cannot show.
Do not rev it. Nobody is reassured by revving, and the buyer who wants to hear it under load will ask for a test drive anyway.
Making it from the photos
Every phone can do this in some form. iPhones and Android phones will turn a selection of photos into a short clip in the Photos app with a slow pan across each one, and free apps like CapCut or Canva do the same with more control over order, timing, and text. The steps are the same in all of them:
- 01Pick eight to twelve photos, in listing order: the cover photo first, then round the outside, then the interior, the dash, the odometer, the trunk.
- 02Set it to vertical, nine by sixteen. Landscape gets cropped to a strip on every feed.
- 03Two to three seconds a photo. Under thirty seconds in total.
- 04Add a title card at the start: year, make, model, mileage. Add an end card: price and "message me on the listing". Text on the video survives sharing; a caption does not.
- 05Skip the music, or use only a track the app or the platform provides. A licensed track gets the video muted or pulled.
- 06Export at the highest quality the app offers and send it to yourself, not through a chat app, which compresses it again.
What not to do
- Film while driving, or film someone else driving it past. It is dangerous, it is blurry, and it shows nothing.
- Film at night or in the garage. Same as photos: the phone smears everything trying to cope.
- Narrate. Wind, traffic, and a voice a buyer did not ask for. Put the words on the screen instead.
- Make it long. Thirty seconds is the ceiling. A buyer who wants more will come and see it.
- Use a filter or a speed ramp. The car should look like the car.
- Post the video without the photos. The video is a supplement. The photos are the listing.
Where it goes
Marketplace lets a vehicle listing carry a video; add it when you add the photos, after the photos, so the cover photo stays first. On Reels or TikTok, post it from your own account with the year, make, model, mileage, price, and your area in the caption, and turn comments off if you do not want to field lowball offers in public. And keep it on your phone: the first buyer who messages gets it in the reply.
The version where the video is already made
Lotsmith makes the photo version for you. Send the photos you already took of the car and every one comes back relit and standing on the backdrop you chose, and in the same folder is a vertical video cut from those prepared photos, in your order, sized for Marketplace and Reels, with no filming and no app. The description is in the folder too, if you gave it the details. The car is not changed; the paint, the wheels, and every mark you photographed come back as they went in.
The first vehicle is free with no card; after that it is eight dollars, once. Lotsmith posts nothing anywhere and never asks for your Facebook login. You upload the video the same way you would the one you made yourself.