How to take good photos of a car you are selling

Prepare the vehicle

A clean vehicle looks better cared for, and a photo does not hide dust. Before you start:

• Wash the outside, wheels and windows included, and dry it so no water marks are left.
• Vacuum the inside and take out anything personal: things on the seats, papers on the dashboard, the phone holder.
• Put the mats back in place and straighten the seats and headrests.
• Leave the front wheels straight or turned slightly, to show the wheel in the front photos.

Choose the light and the place

The best light is an overcast day, or early and late in the day: it is soft, casts no hard shadows and does not fill the paintwork with reflections. Avoid midday sun and, at night, street lights, which change the vehicle's colour.

Find an open place with room to step back, and with no other cars, bins or posts right next to the vehicle. A simple background, such as a plain wall or an empty car park, is less distracting than a busy street.

Which photos to take

Show the whole vehicle, inside and out, in the order someone would see it in person. This list works for almost all of them:

• Front three-quarter, from one of the front corners: the best photo to open the listing with.
• Rear three-quarter, from the opposite corner.
• Both sides, with the whole vehicle in frame.
• The front and the rear, straight on.
• The interior: the dashboard seen from the back seat, the front and rear seats, and the instrument cluster with the engine on, so the mileage shows.
• The open boot and, where it makes sense, the engine.
• The details that matter: wheels and tyres, equipment, and also scratches or dents, which are better shown than explained later.

How to shoot with a phone

• Clean the lens before you start: a fingerprint makes everything hazy.
• Shoot in landscape, the format of listings and websites.
• Step back instead of using digital zoom, which costs sharpness. If your phone has a 2x lens, use it for the outside shots: it distorts the vehicle less than the wide angle.
• Shoot from roughly the height of the middle of the vehicle, not looking down on it.
• Turn off the flash and filters, and do not use portrait mode, which blurs parts of the vehicle.
• Take several from each angle and pick the best one afterwards.

After taking the photos

Pick the best ones and put the front three-quarter first: it is the one that shows in search results.

Before you put the photos online, hide the number plate. A visible plate ties the photos to your vehicle wherever they appear and can be copied onto another one.