If you’re a Real Estate marketer or working in Real Estate property marketing, understanding file types is critical. Not only do they affect how an image looks in your marketing materials, but they also determine how fast it loads on your website and social media sites. In this article, we’ll cover the major types of image files that are used by real estate marketers. We’ll look at what each format does best, when it should be used to create the highest-quality images possible and why other options may not always be suitable for your business needs.
JPG for Real Estate property marketing
JPG is the most common image file type, and it’s used for photos and graphics with lots of colors. They can be compressed without losing quality, which means that you can use them to send images through email or upload them to websites.
Because it is a lossy format, it makes JPEGs great for photos and images that don’t have a lot of color. It can compress these files into smaller sizes without losing too much detail or clarity.
However, JPEGs are not good for logos or text because they don’t support anti-aliasing and have problems handling curves in lines (known as “jaggies”). They also don’t work well with line drawings such as logos, you’ll get blurry edges around objects instead of crisp lines if you try to save these types of images as JPGs.
PNG for Real Estate property marketing
PNG is a bitmap image format that supports lossless compression. It’s an open standard, so it’s supported by all browsers and operating systems, including Windows, MacOS and Linux. There are also many different tools for working with PNG images available on these platforms.
PNGs can have transparent backgrounds, a feature that makes them ideal for web design. This means they allow you to place your logo or other elements over your background image without having ugly white borders around them. However, when used in print ads or brochures where there is no need for transparency.
PNGs are best for graphics like logos or other images that are not photo-like.
File formates – JPGs vs PNGs
JPGs are best for photos, PNGs are better at preserving quality.
JPGs are smaller in size than PNGs, but they tend to degrade over time (when you save them) and can’t be edited as much. PNGs are larger in size but keep their quality better over time. For example, if you’re uploading an image of a logo that doesn’t have any transparency or gradients, then a PNG would be best because it won’t lose any information during the saving process.
WebP for Real Estate property marketing
A new file format that is optimized for the web is known as WebP. It’s similar to JPG, but it offers better compression and quality than JPG images. It has been around since 2010, but it has only recently become widely supported by browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Opera).
WebP offers some advantages over other formats:
- Smaller file size – For example, a 24-megapixel (MP) image converted from RAW format using Adobe Camera RAW will be around 3 MB in size using the lossless WebP format; whereas that same image will be almost double at 6MB when saved as JPG
- Better quality – If you’ve ever tried taking photos with an iPhone camera you know how good those pictures look on screen. However when you open them up there are lots of artifacts present due to compression artifacts caused by JPG encoding
Real estate marketers need to be aware of the image file types that are best suited for the variety of marketing channels they are using.
Real estate marketers need to be aware of the image file types that are best suited for the variety of marketing channels they are using. JPGs are good for photos, while PNGs are better for print materials or large ones that will be viewed on a computer screen. WebP is an emerging format that offers great compression but isn’t yet supported by all browsers.