Real estate professionals understand the importance of curb appeal. If a home does not look attractive from the street, potential buyers may not even look inside. Now that 80% of buyers are starting their search for a new home on the internet, it's important for a property to display strong curb appeal in digital photos as well.

One way to improve the curb appeal of many properties is to crop the top and bottom of the exterior photo. Digital photos are typically captured using a 4 by 3 aspect ratio, meaning a photo that is eight inches wide will be six inches high.

Here is an example of an exterior photo using a 4 by 3 aspect ratio.

The sides of the photo are cropped right to the edge of the roofline, but because this is a wide, single story home, the view is actually from the curb on the opposite side of the street, making this wide home look smaller and drawing attention to the pavement and the width of the street.

Here is the same exterior photo cropped to a 4 by 2 aspect ratio.

Now the focus is on the width of the home rather than on the street in front of it. The photo has not been altered in any way other than being cropped, but the home looks bigger because it fills up more of the picture and because using a wide screen aspect ratio gives the impression that the house is too wide for an ordinary photo.

Is this deceptive? No. This particular home, like many single story ranch homes here in California, is too wide to show properly using a 4 by 3 aspect ratio. The only choices are to make the home look deceptively small, show less than the full width of the home so that you can represent a near curb view, or crop the photo and change the aspect ratio to best represent the true appearance of the home.

Thanks!

Frank Jewett