How to Photograph a Car to Sell It (With a Phone)

Nothing else on this page matters if the car is dirty. Dust reads as neglect in a photo far more than it does in person, and a buyer scrolling past forty listings decides in under a second whether yours was looked after. A thirty dollar hand wash, or an hour with a bucket, is the single highest return step here.

Do the inside at the same time. Take everything out: the phone mount, the air freshener, the receipts in the door pocket, the car seat, the stuff in the trunk. Vacuum the carpets and wipe the dash. Then let the car dry completely before you shoot it. A wet car photographs badly, because water beads on the paint show up as spots and the reflections go everywhere.

Direct sun at midday is the worst light there is for a car. Paint is a mirror, so every hard highlight burns out to white, the shadows under the arches go black, and the side facing away from the sun disappears. Photographers call the soft, even light of an overcast sky a giant softbox, and it is free.

If the forecast is clear, shoot in the hour after sunrise or the hour before sunset, when the sun is low and the light is warm and coming from the side. Keep the sun behind you or to one side of you, never behind the car, and never shoot into it. Turn the headlights off. On most phones they add a flare that swallows the front of the car.

Do not shoot at night with the flash, in a garage under a strip light, or under a street lamp. The color will be wrong and the phone will smear everything trying to compensate.

The background is most of what separates a driveway photo from a dealership one. A buyer is not consciously looking at the fence, the trash cans, the neighbor's car, or your front door, but all of it is in the picture, and all of it says amateur.

Find somewhere plain and empty: the far end of a grocery store parking lot early on a Sunday, an industrial park on the weekend, a park with a wide path, a blank wall. You want open space all round the car so nothing sits behind it or grows out of the roof. Pull forward a few yards from whatever is behind you so it blurs off into the distance rather than sitting sharp against the bodywork.

Turn the front wheels slightly toward the camera for the three-quarter shots, so you see the face of the wheel rather than the tread. It is the one thing every professional does and almost no private seller does, and it is why their photos look finished.

Wipe the lens with your shirt. It is covered in fingerprints and the haze that produces is why so many phone photos look washed out.

Crouch. The single most common mistake is shooting from standing height, which makes the car look small and the roof look big. Hold the phone at headlight height, roughly level with the top of the tire, and keep it level. Tilting it up or down makes the lines of the car bend.

Use the normal lens at 1x. Do not pinch to zoom, which just crops and throws away detail, and do not use the 0.5x wide lens, which stretches the car at the edges. Step back until the whole car fits with a little air around it. Shoot exteriors in landscape so the car fills the frame side to side. Tap the screen on the car so the phone focuses and exposes on it and not on the sky.

Turn off portrait mode, night mode, and any filter. Leave HDR on if the phone offers it; that is the setting that keeps the sky and the shadows at the same time.

Twenty to twenty five photos is the right number. Fewer and the buyer wonders what you are hiding; more and they stop looking. Shoot them in this order, because it is the order a buyer walks round a car, and the marketplaces show photos in the order you upload them.

It feels wrong to put your worst pictures in the listing. Do it anyway. A buyer who finds the scratch in photo nineteen has been told the truth and keeps trusting the rest of the listing. A buyer who finds it in person, having driven over, feels misled, and the fastest way to lose a sale that is otherwise done is to have someone walk up to a car that does not match the pictures.

Flaw photos also stop the question. Nobody messages to ask about the dent you have already shown them from three angles.

A short list of things that cost sales, from most to least common.

Do everything above and the photos will be sharp, well lit, and complete, and the car will still be standing in a parking lot. That is fine for most sales. It is not what a dealership listing looks like, and if your car is going up against one, the difference is the background and the light, not the car.

That is the part Lotsmith does. You send the photos you already took, and every one comes back relit and standing on a clean background, with a vertical video cut from them and the written description, in one folder you post yourself. The car is not changed: the paint, the wheels, and every flaw you photographed come back exactly as they went in. The first vehicle is free, and after that it is eight dollars, once, for that car.

If you shot it on an overcast morning against a plain wall and the pictures look good, you have done the work. Post them.