Host guide
Booking.com Photo Requirements for Hosts, Explained
Booking.com's bar is higher than you might expect — 2048 pixels on the long edge, at least ten photos, specific guidance on height and angles. Here is the complete picture, and how to meet it from your own photos.
What Booking.com requires
These are the requirements from Booking.com's partner help centre — worth reading closely, because the resolution bar is more than double Airbnb's.
| Requirement | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| At least 2048 × 1080 pixels | Roughly 2.2 megapixels. Modern phone photos clear this easily — but check anything that has been through a messaging app or a listing import. |
| Landscape (horizontal) only | Booking.com displays photos in landscape; vertical shots don't show well. |
| At least 10 photos | With at least four photos per room or unit, plus at least one photo of the bathroom and toilet. Larger properties — aparthotels and multi-unit buildings — are asked for a minimum of 24. |
| Camera height of about 1–1.6 m (3–5 ft) | Consistent eye-level shots read as neutral and professional; a phone held at chest height matches this naturally. |
| Shoot from room corners | The same advice you'll hear from any interior photographer — it gives depth and shows the space. |
| 360° photos: 2:1 ratio, at least 1280 × 900 px | Only if you use 360° imagery at all. |
The full reference is Booking.com's own article, Understanding photo requirements for your property — always worth a re-read before a big upload, as the details can change.
What Booking.com asks you to avoid
Booking.com lists specific things to keep out of your gallery. It reads like a checklist of every shortcut hosts are tempted by:
- Grainy or pixelated photos — the symptom of small, over-compressed files.
- Blurry or tilt-shift photos.
- Over-processed photos, and photos with filters, strong contrast, over-saturation or excessive HDR.
- Collages, watermarks or illustrations in photos.
- Skewed, tilted, stretched or distorted photos.
- Black-and-white photos, and extreme wide-angle or fisheye shots.
Two of these deserve a moment if you are considering enhancement. First, over-processing: the goal of a correction should be that the photo looks honestly better, not obviously edited — no crushed shadows, no invented colours, no filter look. Second, stretching: any resizing should preserve the original aspect ratio; a stretched panorama is immediately visible and off-putting. Superphoto's enhancement preserves the property and the frame — corrections to light, colour and clarity, with optional scene touches you choose and approve — never a re-imagining of the space.
Meeting the 2048-pixel bar
The resolution requirement trips up more hosts than anything else, almost always because the photo took a detour: sent through a messaging app, pulled back from the platform, or copied from a social media post. All of those compress and shrink.
- Upload the original file from your phone or camera whenever possible.
- Check before you assemble the set: on a phone, open the photo and look at its details; on a computer, right-click and check the file properties. If the long edge is under 2048 pixels, go back to the source.
- Enhanced downloads from Superphoto are high-resolution exports, sized for major listing platforms — but they can only be as detailed as the original they came from, so start from the best file you have.
Shooting a set that passes — and performs
Meeting the requirements is the entrance fee; the same photos still have to earn the click. The capture routine is the same whichever platform you publish to:
- Shoot in daylight with the lamps on, in landscape, from room corners, at chest height.
- Cover every room and space — for Booking.com that means four photos per room plus the bathroom as a floor, not a target.
- Finish with consistent enhancement, so the whole gallery has one standard of brightness, colour and geometry.
Our phone photography guide walks through the full routine, and the Airbnb requirements guide covers the other platform's rules — a single well-made photo set satisfies both.