How to get your listing photos in the right order on Domain and realestate.com.au.

Portal uploaders generally sort files by filename. Your phone named them by capture time and your photographer's export named them by frame number, and neither of those is the order a buyer should meet the property in.

So the set lands in a sequence nobody chose, and someone drags twenty thumbnails into place in a browser window. It is a ten minute job, it recurs on every listing, and it is the first thing to get skipped in a busy week. Skipped means the first image a buyer sees is whichever file happened to sort first.

The first image does most of the work. It is what appears in search results, in the portal apps, in email alerts and in every share of the listing. Everything after it is only seen by people the first image already convinced.

Pick the single strongest shot of the property. Usually that is the front elevation on a good day or the best living space. A twilight frame or an aerial is a legitimate hero too where it genuinely sells the property.

Do not lead with a detail shot, a bathroom, or an empty room, however well photographed.

Buyers scroll in a straight line, so the sequence should walk them through the property roughly the way you would walk them through it at an open.

Exterior first, then the main living areas, then the kitchen, then the bedrooms, then the bathrooms, then the outdoor spaces, and finally the aerial or boundary shot that places the property in its street and its block.

Treat that as a default rather than a rule. If the land is the story, the aerial moves up. If the kitchen is the reason someone will buy, it goes before the living room. What matters is that the sequence is deliberate and that it is the same one every time unless you have a reason.

Because the uploader sorts by name, naming the files in order is the fix: 01-front.jpg, 02-living.jpg, 03-kitchen.jpg and so on.

Pad single digits with a leading zero. Without it most sorting puts 10 immediately after 1, and a twenty image set comes out scrambled again in a way that is genuinely easy to miss on a quick check.

Do it once, in the folder, before anything is uploaded. It is faster than reordering thumbnails, and the naming survives uploading the same set to a second portal.

A set gets judged on its weakest image as much as its best. Fifteen strong photos beat 25 that include a dim hallway, a laundry, a near duplicate angle and a photo of a fence.

Every image that adds no information is another chance for a buyer to stop scrolling. Drop the duplicates, drop the rooms that photograph badly and were never going to sell the property, and drop anything that raises a question you would rather answer in person.

The exception is a feature buyers actively look for. A garage, a shed, a pool or a study earns a frame even when the photo is ordinary, because its absence from the set reads as its absence from the property.

If you are already assembling the campaign in DomeAgent, the portal upload set handles the numbering. You drag the listing's photos into the order you want, put the hero first, exclude the shots that are not going up, and the download is a ZIP with the photos numbered in that order and the listing's videos alongside them.

The selection saves against the listing, so uploading to a second portal, or re-uploading after a price change, does not mean setting the order again.

To be clear about what it does not do: DomeAgent does not publish to Domain or realestate.com.au directly. It assembles the set and you upload it.