Website, portal, Google.
The same folder everywhere?

Nothing noticeable – and that is the awkward part. Every picture works a little somewhere and fully nowhere. There is no day on which something goes wrong and no figure in which it would show. In hotel photography a picture list is built along the house – not along the places the pictures later stand in.

The evening shot of the fireside room carries the home page. On the booking portal that same picture sits between the bright room shots of the neighbouring houses and simply looks dark. The other way round: the plain room shot that is exactly right on the portal turns the home page into a catalogue.

The four places do not differ in taste. They differ in how far the guest already is when the picture reaches him – whether he is comparing, checking, or was not looking at all. Who owns the pictures in all those places and who else may advertise with them is set out under who may advertise with them.

Here he knows. He typed the name in or came through a recommendation. He is no longer comparing twenty houses, he is looking for a reason.

So the website carries what goes under on the portal: atmosphere, stance, the story of the house. The light in the late afternoon, the view from the window, the hands at the bar, the detail that looks like this only here.

And it is the only one of the four places where you decide everything: order, size, crop. Why people in the picture carry more than an empty hall is set out under people in the picture.

There nothing is looked at, it is compared. Your first picture sits small in a row beside those of the neighbouring houses, and it alone decides whether there is a second one.

After that the guest works through a list: room, bathroom, breakfast, exterior. In that order, because that is how he does it across twenty houses in a row. What loses here is not bad – it simply answers none of those questions: the dark mood shot, the extreme detail, the frame in which the room cannot be made out.

Then there is the crop. Booking portals crop, and they crop differently in the results list than in the gallery. What sits at the edge of the frame is no longer there in the list. How far a room picture may flatter is set out under what a room picture promises.

That is where the guest stands who already knows the name. He types it in because he wants to check: whether the house is still there, whether it still looks like that, how you get in.

So something other than atmosphere counts here. What is needed is recognition: the exterior, the entrance, the sign, the driveway – what he will see again on arrival.

And it is the only place where your pictures are not on their own. Guests upload their own shots there. Whoever posts nothing current leaves the picture of their house to the phone snaps of last summer's guests.

That is two places in one. In the feed nobody was looking for you: your picture stands there among everything else and is seen in passing. What stops people are situations and people, rarely an empty room.

In the search inside the same app it is the other way round. There people look very deliberately – by the location tag, by the name of the house, by tags for the region. And whoever searches that way is usually not after the polished page but after what other people have shown. The location tag leads first to the guests' own shots; your house stands beside them there, not in front of them. The same position as in the Google profile, only faster.

A day of photography cannot carry that on its own, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. A feed lives on today – on the weather, on the plate, on whatever is happening in the house right now. The house does that itself, with a phone.

What a day of photography can add are the pictures that stand between the phone snaps and show that somebody takes the house seriously. And shots in portrait format: none of the other three places needs them, which is why they are on no list.

No. A house has one appearance, and one day of photography delivers pictures for all four places – if it is known beforehand that there are four.

The difference lies in the list, not in the effort. A shot of the breakfast room is taken anyway. Whether a second one is taken beside it, showing the room plainly and brightly, is a matter of five minutes – but only if somebody wrote it down beforehand.

What is missing from the list is missing afterwards. And a second day costs a second day. What should be settled beforehand is set out under what has to be ready in the house.