For real-estate photography agencies
Editing capacity that scales with your shoots, not your headcount
Your photographers shoot. Lab enhances, stages and draws the floor plan, to the same standard every time, in minutes. We are putting it into our own production and this is what we have learned so far.
- 01
Minutes per shoot, not hours
Upload the set. Enhanced, staged, plans drawn, ready to review.
- 02
One look, whoever shot it
The delivery profile decides the output, not the photographer's instincts.
- 03
More products, no new suppliers
Staging, floor plans and social from the stills you already have.
We run these models in our own photography production.
Inside your existing workflow
- 01
Photographer uploads
The shoot goes to Lab straight from your app or your ingest folder.
- 02
Your profile applies
Enhancement runs against the delivery profile for that client account, not a global default.
- 03
Products run on demand
Staging, floor plans and social from the same stills. No second visit.
- 04
You review and deliver
Your team checks a finished set instead of producing one.
Case study
How Backbone is moving its own production onto Lab
Backbone operates a real-estate photography marketplace across Europe. The models we sell through Lab are the ones we are putting into our own pipeline, account by account. This is where we have got to.
- 100k+
- properties
- 500+
- photographers
- Thousands
- client accounts
The constraint
A photography agency has a structural problem. The photographers are independent, the client is buying a consistent product. We book 500+ photographers across Europe, shooting on different bodies, in different light, with different instincts about exposure and verticals. Every client expects their listings to look like they came from the same place.
For years the answer was editors. Human editors are good, and they do not scale linearly: volume growth meant hiring against a booking curve that moves with the season. Turnaround was hours at best, and quality complaints almost always traced back to which editor picked up the job rather than to the shoot. Every new product made it worse, needing a new tool, a new supplier or a new skill in the team.
What we implemented
- At ingest.
- A photographer uploads through the Backbone app and every image goes to Lab before anyone opens the shoot.
- Per-account profiles.
- Each client's treatment is configured once: saturation, white balance, sky handling, verticals, crop set. This is the piece that made photographer independence stop being a quality risk.
- Automatic compliance.
- Faces and licence plates are blurred automatically rather than checked by hand.
- On-demand products.
- Staging and floor plans run from the stills already delivered. No second visit.
How we are rolling it out
- Enhancement first, on one product family, run in parallel with our editors and compared on real client work rather than test images
- Client profiles built account by account, starting with the highest-volume accounts where the look was most explicitly specified
- Photo Studio opened up for editing any visual by hand: decluttering, virtual staging, sky replacement, auto enhancement and the rest of the toolset
- Accounts still on the previous editing path stay there until their profile is signed off
What has changed so far
- Throughput.
- Where Lab profiles are running, editing capacity no longer caps how many bookings we take.
- Consistency.
- Where a profile is in place, the delivery standard is set by the profile, not by who edited the shoot.
- Turnaround.
- A few minutes from upload to reviewable set, against hours before.
- Range.
- Staging, floor plans and social without adding a supplier, on any account once its profile is live.
« We built Backbone Lab because we needed editing that was both scalable and fully customisable per account, at the quality a professional property listing demands. »
Questions we get from agencies
No. They shoot as they do now and upload as they do now. The profile handles the rest.
Yes. Saturation, white balance, sky handling and crops are configured per client account, so a client with a house style keeps it.
You do. Your team keeps final review. The change is that they check a finished set instead of building one.
Where Lab is handling the editing, throughput doesn't depend on who is available. A busy week stops being a hiring decision.
No, and we still haven't. We moved our photo studio first, then are going account by account as each delivery profile was signed off. That is the sequence we would recommend.
Run it on your own shoots
Send us a real set and get it back edited, staged and plan-drawn. Compare it against your current output. One call to set it up.
Book a demo