Bigger IS better!

It has always been a big source of frustration to me when I see some of my photos reduced to tiny thumbnails on some realtors site. I work hard on my images, and to see them reduced and compressed until they are almost unrecognizable is heartbreaking sometimes.

It's not the fault of the realtor. They don't usually have a choice when dealing with sites like realtylink.org and website templates designed by Ubertor and the like. They were all built with bandwidth costs in mind. It's a lot cheaper to display a small, compressed image than a large, high resolution one. But that's not a big issue any more. Bandwidth costs are relatively cheap, and according to one recent report, 87% of home buyers are using the Internet to search for homes (I would have thought it was closer to 100%). And, based on the comments of virtually all of my realtor clients, good quality photos play a huge part in generating interest for properties.

So it looks like someone finally heard my whining and built a realtor website application that can handle big photos. Judith Matheson just showed off her latest listing here using a template designed by VisualTour.com . According to Judith, it's so easy to update that even she can do it!

Looks to me like this Flash application determines the size of your monitor and delivers the largest possible image to you. Which can be good or bad, depending on the quality of the photos. In the case of Judith's listing, I sent her the usual size images, which are pretty small, so as a result they look a little fuzzy on my 24 inch monitor. We're going to have to fix that. Here are some of the same images from that shoot, which by the way, is a stunning townhouse in Richmond.