Carsales, Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace: Photo Requirements Compared

Every Australian car listing platform wants photos. None of them want quite the same photos. If you are cross posting the same car to Carsales, Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace, which most private sellers now do, you are dealing with three different sets of expectations and one set of images.

This is the reference nobody had written, plus the practical advice on what to shoot once so it works everywhere.

The quick comparison

Carsales is the highest intent platform of the three. Buyers there are further down the funnel and the listings are more heavily scrutinised. Carsales recommends at least fifteen photos and provides a Guided Photos flow that prompts you through a set sequence. Landscape orientation, shot outside, uncluttered background. It is the platform where photo quality moves the needle most, because you are sitting directly next to dealer listings shot by professionals.

Gumtree is more forgiving and more variable. The audience expects rougher photos, which cuts both ways. Good photos stand out more here than anywhere else, because the baseline is low. There is less structure to the upload flow, so shot order is entirely on you.

Facebook Marketplace is the odd one out. It is mobile first, the thumbnail crop is aggressive, and your first image gets cropped much closer to square than you expect. A wide three quarter shot that looks great on Carsales can lose the front of the car entirely in a Marketplace thumbnail. The audience is browsing, not searching, so the first image is doing almost all the work.

What this means for how you shoot

Shoot wide, crop later. If your source images are tight, you have no room to adapt them per platform. Leave breathing space around the car and you can crop a square for Marketplace, a wider frame for Carsales, and keep the original for Gumtree.

Shoot landscape, always. Every one of these platforms is built around horizontal images. Portrait photos get letterboxed, cropped badly, or both.

Pick your hero shot deliberately. The front three quarter angle, front wheels turned slightly toward the camera, is the default for a reason. It shows the front, one full side, the stance and the wheels in a single frame. It survives a square crop better than a straight side profile.

The fifteen shot sequence

This covers what buyers on all three platforms look for, in the order they look for it. If you want the full technique behind each shot, see how to photograph a car for sale with just your phone.

Exterior, seven shots. Front three quarter. Rear three quarter. Straight side, both sides. Straight front. Straight rear. One wheel, close.

Interior, five shots. Driver's seat and dash from the open door. Front seats from the rear. Rear seats. Instrument cluster with the odometer visible and the ignition on. Boot, empty.

Mechanical and honest, three shots. Engine bay. Service book or logbook. Any damage you know about, photographed plainly and in daylight.

That last one is the shot most sellers skip and it is the one that saves you the most time. A buyer who sees the kerbed rim in your gallery and still calls you is a buyer who is not going to walk at inspection over a kerbed rim.

The number plate question

There is no Australian law requiring you to hide your plate in a listing photo. Plenty of sellers do it anyway, and there is a reasonable case for it. Your registration number, combined with other details in your listing, is enough for someone to run a check on the car and in some cases to work out roughly where it lives.

The practical middle ground: blur or cover the plate on the public listing, and send unblurred photos to a genuinely interested buyer who asks. Buyers do sometimes want the plate visible so they can run a PPSR check themselves. A blurred plate on Marketplace and a clear one in a direct message is the arrangement most people settle on.

Do not put a fake plate on the car in editing. That is the kind of edit that starts looking like concealment.

Backgrounds, and why they matter more here than overseas

Australian private sellers are photographing cars in driveways, on nature strips, and in apartment car parks. Overseas advice about shooting on a quiet stretch of road at golden hour assumes a kind of space and traffic that a lot of Australian sellers simply do not have on a Saturday morning.

This is the single biggest gap between a private listing and a dealer listing, and it is not a skill gap. A dealer has a lot. You have a driveway with a bin in it.

Replacing the background is the fastest way to close that gap, and it is a legitimate edit because it changes nothing about the car. We covered whether editing is allowed on Carsales separately, since it is the question sellers ask most. The work involved is more than it sounds, because a car dropped into a new environment only looks right if the lighting on the paint, the reflections, and the shadow under the car all agree with the new surroundings. Get that wrong and it reads as fake immediately. Get it right and it just reads as a car that was photographed somewhere nicer, with every scratch and stone chip exactly where you left them.

One more thing about first images

On all three platforms, changing your first image is the cheapest experiment available to you. If a listing has been up for two weeks with no enquiries, swap the lead photo before you drop the price. Sellers reach for price first and it is almost always the wrong lever to pull first.

Check the current specs yourself

Carsales publishes its own photo guidance in the help centre, and it updates. Facebook's Marketplace image specs change more often than anyone would like. Before a big listing it is worth thirty seconds confirming the current recommendations rather than trusting an article, including this one.

Whatever the platform, the photos themselves do the selling. If yours were shot on a driveway, Cardabra can put the same car, condition untouched, into a clean setting sized for any of these platforms, and the trial credits cost nothing to test. If you are comparing editing tools first, our CarPixAI alternative guide for private sellers covers what to look for in one built for the Australian market.