Guide
How to photograph a car for sale with a phone
A modern phone takes a better photograph than most sellers need. What decides whether a listing gets opened is not the camera: it is where you park, when you shoot, and whether you were willing to photograph the bad part.
A phone
Any phone from the last several years
Somewhere plain
An empty lot beats your driveway
Overcast light
Or the hour after sunrise, before sunset
A wash, and time to dry
Wheels included. Wet paint hides its condition
An empty car
Trunk, door pockets, the lot
Before you shoot
What to settle before the first photograph.
Three decisions come before you pick the phone up, and they matter more than which phone it is.
Move the car
Not your driveway, with the trash cans, the neighbor’s van and a basketball hoop in every frame. An empty corner of a parking lot, an industrial street on a Sunday, a park entrance. Plain background, nothing growing out of the roof, and room to walk all the way around it.
Wait for the light
Bright overcast is the easiest light there is: it wraps the car and shows the paint without hard shadows. Failing that, early or late in the day. Midday sun is the one to avoid, because it puts black shadows down the side of the car and a hot white streak along the top.
Clean it and empty it
Washed and dry, wheels included, because dirty wheels are the first thing a car person notices. Inside: everything out, including the trunk and the door pockets. A phone mount, a child seat and a parking receipt tell a story about the car that has nothing to do with the car.
The shot list
Ten photographs, in this order.
Shoot them in order and the set reads as a walk around the car rather than as a pile of pictures.
Three quarter, front
Stand at the corner so two sides show at once. This is the one that goes first and the one that ends up as the link preview.
Three quarter, rear
The opposite corner. Between the two, a buyer has seen the whole car.
Straight down each side
Level with the middle of the car, far enough back that the doors are not curved.
Front and rear, square on
Lights on if it is dull. This is where a buyer checks that the panels line up.
Interior from the driver's door
Door open, seat pushed back, shot from outside rather than from inside.
Rear seats and the trunk
Empty, both of them. A folded stroller in the shot is the only thing anybody will look at.
The odometer, readable
Engine on, numbers legible, no reflection. A blurry odometer reads as a hidden one.
The engine bay
Lid up, in daylight. It does not need to be detailed, it needs to look unhidden.
Wheels and tires
One corner is enough if they match. Tread visible.
Whatever is wrong with it
The scratch, the curbed wheel, the torn seat. Close enough to see, wide enough to place.
How to stand
Four habits worth picking up.
None of these need equipment and all of them are visible in the result.
Crouch, and step back
Shoot from about the height of the hood, not from your eye level. Standing over a car makes it look small and shows a lot of roof, which is not what the buyer is paying for. Crouching slightly puts the camera where the car looks like itself.
Then walk backwards and zoom in a little rather than standing close with the wide lens. A phone’s widest lens bends straight lines near the edges, so a car shot from three feet away has a stretched nose and a shrunken back. Two steps back fixes what no editing can.
Watch the reflections, and lock the exposure
Car paint is a mirror. You will be in the doors, and so will whatever is behind you. Move until the reflection is sky and empty ground rather than a building, a fence or a person holding a phone.
Tap the car on the screen before each shot so the phone exposes for the paint rather than for the sky, and hold to lock it if your phone offers that. Otherwise ten photographs of one car come back in six different brightnesses and the set looks like six different cars.
The tenth photograph
Photograph the worst thing about the car.
This is the advice sellers argue with, and it is the one that changes who turns up.
Every used car has something. A scratch down the rear quarter, a curbed wheel, a torn seat bolster, a warning light that comes on cold. The instinct is to shoot around it and mention it if asked, and the instinct is expensive.
What a hidden flaw actually buys you is a stranger standing next to your car, discovering it, and now holding a reason to reopen the price. You will either take less than you meant to or waste both afternoons. What showing it buys you is fewer messages and better ones: the people who could not live with it did not come, and the people who did come already knew and decided it was fine.
It does something else that is harder to measure. A listing that shows one honest fault makes the other nine photographs credible. A listing where everything is perfect makes a careful buyer wonder what is being kept out of frame, and careful buyers are the ones with the money.
Shoot it twice: once close enough to judge the size of it, once from far enough away to see where on the car it is. Then say the same thing in the text, which is covered in how to write a car listing.
Before you upload
What to tidy, and what to leave alone.
Straighten the horizon
A tilted car looks like a mistake even to somebody who cannot say why. Every phone has a straighten tool and it takes a second per photograph.
Put the best one first
The first photograph is the one most likely to be seen, and on many channels it is also the thumbnail and the image that appears when the link is shared. Usually the front three quarter.
Check what is in the background
Your house number, your plate if you would rather not publish it, a street sign that places your home. Worth one look through the set before it goes anywhere public.
Leave the filters alone
Slight brightening of a dark interior is fine. Anything beyond that and the car in the parking lot does not match the car in the listing, which is a conversation about trust you do not want to have at the start.
One technical note if you are uploading from an iPhone. Photographs taken on a recent iPhone are saved in a format many sites cannot read, and the usual result is an upload that fails without explaining itself. Sites that handle this ask your phone for a standard image instead, and the conversion happens on the phone without you doing anything. If an upload keeps failing somewhere, that is usually why, and mailing the photographs to yourself first is the workaround.
Read next
What the photographs feed into.
Photographs get the listing opened. These cover what the reader meets next.
The whole process, in order: how to sell a car privately.
How to write a car listing that sells
What a private buyer actually reads, the six questions every one of them asks, and how saying what is wrong with the car brings you better buyers rather than fewer.
Selling a car you still owe money on
The lender holds the title, so the payoff has to happen inside the sale rather than after it. How that works, what to ask for in writing, and the safest place to do it.
Where to sell a car privately
Six places a private car actually sells, what each one is good at, how much work it costs you, and why most sellers should use more than one of them.
Frequently asked questions
How many photos should a car listing have?
Ten covers a car completely: both three quarter views, both sides, front, rear, the interior, the trunk, the odometer and the damage. Fewer than six can read as something being left out. Far more than ten is rarely looked at, because a buyer has already decided by the third photograph. WheelSheet allows 10.
What is the best light for photographing a car?
Bright overcast, or the hour after sunrise and before sunset, are the easiest conditions to work in. Direct midday sun puts hard shadows across the panels and blows out the highlights, which hides the shape of the car and makes people assume something is being hidden with it.
Should I photograph the damage on my car?
Yes, and close enough to see it. It costs you the buyers who would have turned around in your driveway, which saves you both an afternoon, and it makes every other photograph believable to everybody else. A flaw you showed is a detail. The same flaw found in person is a reason to renegotiate.
Should I wash the car before photographing it?
Wash it and let it dry. A wet car hides paint condition, which buyers know, and water spots photograph worse than dust. Clean the inside more carefully than the outside: interior photographs are where a buyer decides how the car was treated.
Do phone photos need editing?
Straighten them and stop. Brightening a dark interior slightly is fine. Filters, heavy contrast and saturation make a car look like an advertisement, and the buyer who drives over finds a car that does not match, which is the worst possible start to a conversation about price.
Somewhere to show all ten at full width.
Full width, in order, every one of them opening to the whole screen, with the specification beside them. 10 days free.