254-WGAN-TV | Fotello AI Real Estate Photo Editing: My First Impressions; Tom Sparks with Scan Your Space | Thursday, 16 July 2025 | WGAN-TV Podcast Guest Co-Host: Tom Sparks, Founder and CEO of ScanYourSpace, a division of Sparks Media Group www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Are you curious how Fotello AI real estate photo editor stacks up in the real world?
- Are you wondering if Fotello can match or beat human editors?
- Do you want to hear first impressions of Fotello from a real estate photographer? Stay tuned.
Hi all, I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com]
Today is Wednesday, July 16th, 2025. You’re watching WGAN-TV Live at 5: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today.
We have an awesome show for you! Fotello AI Real Estate Photo Editor: First Impressions From a Real Estate Photographer.
My co-host and subject matter expert is Tom Sparks, founder and CEO of [www.ScanYourSpace.com], a division of [www. SparksMediaGroup.com]. Tom, thanks for being back on the show.
- Well, thanks for having me. The check’s in the mail.
- Looking forward to it. Before I ask you about your first impressions of Fotello and then a deeper dive into [WGAN.info/ fotello] tell us about Sparks Media Group and Scan Your Space.
- Sure. So, I need to insert my AI version of me to replay this, but I started Sparks Media Group in 2018 to cater to the residential real estate market.
I was blown away [by Fotello]. I’ve been using it a lot this last month. Maybe 15, 20 [listings], somewhere in that ballpark.
Tom Sparks
Founder and CEO
Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
And that was going well. And shortly after, I realized a need for the commercial and everything else space, and so that’s what Scan Your Space is. It caters to industrial, hospitality, retail, commercial real estate, everything else other than residential.
- And the services that Scan Your Space and Sparks Media Group provides?
- We do photos, video, aerial, floor plans, virtual staging, virtual decluttering, property websites, 3D tours, pretty much everything you can need.
- And which platforms are you using for your tours?
- Well, we use Matterport, we use iGUIDE, we just recently started using Giraffe360, Realsee. What did I miss? iGUIDE, Matterport,
I think I got ‘em all, right?
- I think so. And your coverage area?
- We’re in California, for sure. We have a few photographers in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, D.C., and so we’re kind of just trying to expand outward.
- Great. And, Tom, I think for the purpose of today’s show, it’d be helpful to understand perhaps a little bit about how you shoot photos and how you edit photos.
- Yeah, so we shoot with ambient lighting. We don’t really do flambient, or we haven’t done flambient. I’m kind of a purist in the sense that we shoot what the house is, if we’re talking about houses, and so we’re not going to artificially light up a house.
So we shoot with ambient light. We shoot bracketed photos, five brackets, with a mirrorless or DSLR camera, a standard kind of wide angle lens, 14 millimeter, 16 millimeter, somewhere in that range, and that’s how we shoot.
And then I have an in-house editing team who edits all my photos, and we deliver them to the agents within 24 hours, it’s usually a little less. So we did a twilight shoot last night at about 8:30, I had the images by 9 PM, and the agent had the images fully edited by about 9 AM this morning.
- Okay, cool, and how much experience have you had with the Fotello AI real estate photo editor?
- Yeah, I’ve been using it a lot in this last month. Maybe 15, 20 folders, somewhere in that ballpark?
- Folders meaning listings?
- Correct, yeah.
- And your first impressions?
- To be honest, I was blown away. I used an example earlier today when talking to an agent that it gets things right about 95% of the time.
The 5% that it doesn’t get quite right, we can submit a revision request and a human will process that, and we’ll have those revisions back in a quick amount of time and then it’s 100%. So I’m super impressed by it.
- Tell me more about your first impressions, perhaps maybe a little bit more granular in terms of the things that you look to for your photo editors.
For example, blue sky replacement, sharpening, verticals. Could you comment on a little deeper dive of first impressions of [www.WGAN.info/fotello]?
- Yeah, for example with the human editors, we ask them to adjust the verticals so that the walls are nice and straight, the pictures aren’t slanted. Every once in a while, we as professionals are off when we’re shooting the images.
We do offer a blue sky replacement. And so what I look for from the human editors is that the clouds aren’t repeating, it’s not the same cloud just flipped. That’s a big thing for me. We don’t really ask them to sharpen too much.
I usually do that if I notice something’s a little off, I’ll sharpen it up before I deliver it to the agent, but typically there’s not an issue in that realm. And so uploading to Fotello, it handles the blue skies perfectly, it does the sky replacement, and hasn’t had any complaints about how the blue skies come out.
There have been a few issues that I noticed where when ... I’m going to pull up an image just to give you the right verbiage, but I think it was the vertical correction, let me pull this up, auto perspective correction.
When that’s on, occasionally on, I think, an aerial and maybe a couple inside shots, the image was skewed a little bit, a little bit too much for my liking. And when I turned that off, it fixed it and it looks like a good, nice vertical shot, so, yeah, but no-
- And let me, Tom, let me follow up on that, because Fotello delivers the AI-edited images within minutes. So once you got back your images, were you able to, is it just deselect that feature or did you have to wait for hours for it to come back on that particular feature?
- Yeah, so you can deselect it. It’s not hours, it’s maybe like 10 minutes or so that it, I think, reprocesses and uploads it. It’d be nice if we could deselect it and it just, bam, right away fixes it, but it doesn’t do that. And that’s fine, I mean, 10 minutes waiting is not a huge deal. I don’t even think it’s 10 minutes. Definitely not eight, 10, 12 hours.
- Mm-hmm. So, in your mind as you play through the different tactical things that your human editors are doing, could you
speak to how Fotello is ... I don’t know if it’s on a grade or it’s just your observations, what words would you use to describe the different services that Fotello is enhancing with your real estate photos?
- Yeah, so occasionally I’ve asked to put fire in fireplaces. I don’t really offer that too much because we had an issue where we did that for a fireplace that wasn’t working and it caused an issue with the buyer’s agent and the seller’s agent, and it’s a long kind of story with that, but, so we don’t do too many fire in the fireplaces or images on the screen, but Fotello offers that and they do a good job with that, personalizing the TV screen or adding fire in the fireplace. And I think those are in beta now.
So they do a good job in beta, I can’t imagine much more improvement. Window pulls, there’s been a couple issues with some of the window pulls. A shoot recently, the walls of the building next door were all kind of solid and it mistook that for maybe a blown-out window. And so you see a bit of a window frame, but it’s like floating in the clouds, and that’s from the building across the way.
And I submitted a revision request. There’s a button that says, “Did the AI make a mistake?” when you’re looking at the image. And if you click that, you can type in what you need fixed. And at that point, a human editor takes over. And you have the images back, I think they say within eight hours.
And I’ve gotten those fixed and they look perfect. A couple other things are windows that have divided light, so the grids in the windowpanes, sometimes it will remove that and just have a brand-new view with no divided light, no simulated divided light. And so I just submit a revision request and they fix it. And again, no complaints. I haven’t really had any complaints once they do their revisions.
- Do you find that every job that you do with Fotello needs some human intervention or no, you’ve processed jobs and you’re-
- Yeah, no. Out of, let’s just say 20, I think maybe three or four have needed revisions. And out of those three or four listings, it probably was a total of eight images out of a couple hundred.
- And how is that compared to your human editors? Do you ever need to send things back to your internal human editors for a revision?
- Not too much, just because they’ve been working with me for a while and they know how I am and I look at every photo before I deliver it, so, very, very rarely do I have to tell my editors, “Hey, can you fix this? This doesn’t look right.”
- Mm-hmm, so tell me again how long it generally takes for your human editors to edit your real estate listing’s photos?
I was blown away [by Fotello]. I’ve been using it a lot this last month. Maybe 15, 20 [listings], somewhere in that ballpark.
Tom Sparks Founder and CEO
Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Per folder, I’m not really quite sure. I have three that work fulltime for me, and I upload kind of just a batch of folders in the evening and I start getting them back that evening. So I would say anywhere between, two hours and maybe eight hours. But that’s a lot of folders.
- And is there a commitment time where they must get them back in eight hours or six hours or two hours?
- No, they work the night shift, so I purposely schedule them to start at about 5 PM, 6 PM so that when I wake up in the morning, I have them ready to go. And they frequently, or I’m sorry, they are always ready to go when I wake up.
A couple of times if we’re really swamped, there might be like an hour or two delay, but it’s never more than 10 hours.
- And on Fotello, is there a way that perhaps how you compare the two? I mean, maybe the way to ask you this question is to say, are you planning to replace your human editors using Fotello?
- I think it can help. For me, it can help in the workflow so that we’re not, when we do get slammed, it can kind of take that overflow.
I have agents who will frequently ask me for rush orders, and we do offer that, but our rush is we’ll have them back by 11 PM the same day, which is not really convenient for the agent who has to wait up till 11 PM to get their photos, some of them do.
But an example we had the other day is an agent needed some quick aerial shots of a house, and I don’t know who she was submitting the images to but somebody needed it in order to get the loan approved, it might’ve been the insurance company or the bank.
And so we did the shoot at 9 AM and I gave her the images at like 9:45. I couldn’t have done that with my human editors because
when I order rush through them, or when I have them do rush jobs, I have to schedule them in advance so they can come in early. And this particular day, we got the order at 8 AM on the same day.
So Fotello kind of saved my butt in the sense that I had a happy customer because they were able to order it and get the images back really within like two hours between ordering it and getting the images back.
- Do you charge a premium for rush orders or is that just how you differentiate yourself among other real estate photographers?
- No, we charge for it. So, it’s usually around $80 on top of whatever service.
- Do you edit photos yourself?
- No. I learned that early on, don’t edit. A fun fact about me, I’m colorblind. So, my very first real estate shoot, I thought I’ll use, I think it was Photomatrix or something and just run it kind of through the automated process at the time and then I’ll fix things.
And I delivered the images and they were horrible. The agent was like, “Eh.” And I said, “Okay, you know what? I’ll fix this.” She goes, “Well, I don’t need these fixed because the house already is under contract.” So the next shoot she hired me for, I found an overseas editor, paid them, and she loved those images, and that agent kind of kick-started my whole business. She told her whole office about me, they started using me, and that was really my first real estate client. So I’m glad that I was able to turn it around and not have her with a bad taste in her mouth. But at that point, I knew, like, don’t touch the photos.
- Okay, I only ask because if there is a problem with Fotello, as you’ve mentioned, they’ll fix it with a human-in-the-loop. There’s the opportunity to resubmit the job, have it fixed by a human, but I believe at the moment, correct me if I’m wrong, that’s a sixor eight-hour turnaround?
So I was just wondering if you might have taken a Fotello image that needed tweaking and touched it yourself. The answer is no, okay.
- No. And while I’ve been testing with Fotello, I would say 90% of the listings that I’ve done with them, I’ve had my human editors also edit just so that I had some kind of safety net in case there were issues.
But, I’ve asked a handful of agents, some agents I’ve told about it, some agents I haven’t told that they were AI, and I just asked like, “What did you think of the photos?”
And everybody’s like, “Oh, they’re great, they’re amazing, they look great.” Even some of my photographers who work for me, they shoot for their own clients, and I offer editing services to them too. So it’s not a shoot that comes in through us.
They do the shoot, send images to me, we edit them and give them back, and a lot of them have been impressed with the quality and the speed.
- So, I’m hearing at this moment you haven’t replaced your human editors. Sounds like there’s a business opportunity that you’re looking at for being able to charge a rush charge, $80, use Fotello to turn those around.
Is there a challenge there because you don’t edit, that if Fotello delivers something to you and it does need to be fixed, that you’re not in a position to turn that, to enhance that Fotello image yourself, that you need to wait that six or eight hours presently?
- Yeah, I mean, this isn’t brain surgery, so none of my agents have been... Rush them, and my editors are taking a little longer than normal, the agents aren’t really, like, yelling at me.
- You know what? I guess I should ask, because of those changes that you sent back, I mean, my filter looking at stuff for residential real estate for the vast majority, is it good enough? Is it good enough and that’s the price?
Is it good enough and it comes back fast? So, is your filter for those handful of images where you asked for a human-in-the-loop to edit them, would any normal real estate agent look at them and not even think twice? It’s just that it didn’t hit your standard of a window pull, as an example?
- Well, I think, the examples that I gave where it replaced a whole wall with the sky or removed the divided light, I think those are big enough issues where we needed to wait.
I wouldn’t have wanted to deliver them, because at the end of the day, my clients know that I’m looking at all the images, right? So if I just pass that off, they’re going to assume that I passed off the junk.
- Yeah, would those images, coincidentally, have worked if you turned off the blue, toggled off blue sky, and delivered them without the blue sky replacement? Or no, no, they really needed to be, they were in a set, they needed to match the other images?
- That’s a good question. I didn’t turn off blue sky, so I don’t know. I don’t know if they would’ve passed without blue sky.
- Yeah, the reason I keep asking you about cleaning up and editing, because, you’ve been on the show a number of times, we’ve had Fotello, a Co-Founder of Fotello on the show [Harman Walia], you’ve done two previous WGAN-TV podcasts about Fotello, [Watch these WGAN-TV Podcasts here ...]
www.WGAN.info/FotelloONwgan
And in one of those podcasts, you’re visiting with a Realtor and professional photographer Bruno Versaci.
And as I understand it, Bruno is both a successful real estate agent and a photographer, and his workflow is even if he gets photos back from a human editor or he gets images back from you using Fotello, he still likes to run them through his presets.
- Yeah, I mean, Bruno’s a little different than, I think, most who are doing this at scale. He really goes through, and he’ll remove power cords and power cords from, like, extension cords or power strips and cable box cables and stuff like that. I don’t do that.
- Okay, and neither does Fotello, or at least presently-
- Right.
- Is not an object removal feature of Fotello.
- Now, I think in our video that we put out with Bruno, I think they did, maybe on one of the walls, they did Photoshop out a cable box coax cable.
- Was that with a human-in-the-loop request?
- No, no.
- Hmm.
- I think they just, AI did it. I don’t know, maybe they thought it was a tripod and got rid of it.
- Yeah, well, actually since you mentioned tripod, what is your experience, as you obviously have your human editors remove tripods, how has Fotello done about tripod removal?
- They’ve done pretty good. Occasionally, like in a mirror of a bathroom, you’ll see the tripod, it’ll be kind of like a blurry, squishy line, where we just submit a revision request and they fix it. But they’ve done pretty good for the most part.
I was blown away [by Fotello]. I’ve been using it a lot this last month. Maybe 15, 20 [listings], somewhere in that ballpark.
Tom Sparks Founder and CEO
Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
Really they do well with shower reflections, tripods in the reflection of the shower doors or in the reflection of, like, ovens, microwaves, stuff like that, they’ll handle it really well. But occasionally on the mirrors, where it’s a nice, crystal clear shot of the tripod, it’ll just be like a blurry mess.
- So, if it’s a, if the camera’s straight forward, in the bathroom mirror, the camera comes out. If it’s a little bit of a challenge on some angle of some sort, is that what I’m hearing?
- No, where they’ve kind of messed up is when it’s right in a mirror in the bathroom. They do really well when it’s on a shower door reflection or-
- Ah, okay.
- Yeah, so the knobs-
- All right, so that was, that would be an example of where you asked for the human-in-the-loop to fix the tripod issue.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Okay. All right. So just to stay on this topic a little bit more on first impressions about Fotello AI real estate photo editor versus your human editors, what would it take for you to decide to replace your human editors with Fotello or, nope, that’s not going to happen?
- I like my editors, I love using them, I don’t want to eliminate people’s jobs. I think there’s, I don’t think I would personally replace them completely.
Now, I may shift the load a little bit where they’re all doing kind of equal work, or the humans are doing 80%, AI is doing 20%, or AI is just doing rush. But yeah, I wouldn’t, I don’t think, replace them completely just for the simple fact that I don’t want to eliminate people’s income who rely on me.
- Okay, even though you’re paying a premium for your human editors versus the Fotello AI and that Fotello is delivering your images enhanced within minutes versus overnight, or I’m hearing your workflow is overnight anyway, so unless it’s a rush, that’s not an issue for you, the delivery.
- Yeah, yeah. No, I think just the human component of it, I don’t, I wouldn’t, feel comfortable saying, “Hey, we’re going to have computers do all this now.”
- Okay, well then let’s stay on this topic of rush because that’s an area, it seems like, you’ve identified an opportunity to make more money while having your real estate agent clients happier. Are you going to start emphasizing with existing and new clients rush service?
- Yeah, now here’s the kicker. I’ve been offering $80, we’ll have them back by 11 PM. Maybe I do $150 and we’ll have them back within two hours. So there’s more of an opportunity there to make more money.
- So do you think you’ll start testing the waters with delivery in X hours at different X-tier pricing?
- Yeah, I could see that happening.
- Okay, so I look forward to continuing that conversation with you. I thought what I would do is just do a quick little demo of Fotello. I believe I’m sharing my screen with you now.
- Yep.
- And so for our viewers, if you go to www.WGAN.info/fotello that is our affiliate link and it does get you a special offer automatically from Fotello.
So I encourage you to use www.WGAN.info/Fotello and I’ll talk a little bit about that special offer later in the show. I already have an account, so I’m going to go ahead and log in. I’m going to create a new listing. I’m going to...
Tom was kind enough to send me some images earlier today. I’m going to drag six of those images. They are, I want to say, bracketed, bracketed, five shots. This is an interior, an interior, an interior, interior, interior, interior. This is an exterior. I’m going to change that one. Tom, you were saying?
- Yeah, I was just going to say some feedback maybe that I can give for Fotello. It’d be really nice if these previews we could make the middle bracket, for example, because these are, on the lower end, they’re really hard to see what it is.
- Yes, yes.
- It’d be nice if it just kind of picked the average or the-
- Yep, yep.
- Can easily identify what are interior, what are exterior.
- Yeah. That way you wouldn’t have to do what I’m doing right now in terms of-
- Yeah, yeah.
- Clicking through in order to just like, oh yeah, that’s the backyard shot, oh yeah, that’s the second bedroom or something.
But just to do a quick little demo with the images that you’ve sent, I’m going to go ahead and change the name to Example, let’s see, Example 6: WGAN-TV Live at 5.
These images automatically were recognized that there were five bracketed, so it grouped them, could have done that by count or manually grouped them. It’s in a carousel right now. We have both interior and exterior perspective correction.
- Can I cut in?
- Yeah.
- I like going by count because I know that I’m always shooting five. Sometimes on the timed [bracketed images], if we’re in a really dark space, it’s going to be more than two seconds. And I know you can adjust the slider to, however many seconds.
- Yeah.
- I just like doing count when I know specifically that they are brackets that are five. It just makes it like a no-brainer.
- This one, I happen to have three of three images outdoors. So you may have sent me five, I only saw three.
- Okay.
- So, so at this point, it’s going to default to the signature style. I’m going to hit, I want to pull up my stopwatch here too. What I didn’t say was it had only imported the thumbnails, the previews, it hadn’t imported the images.
So as soon as I hit Enhance Listing, you’ll see that it’s going to start actually uploading files. So it’s uploading, I’ve hit the timer, so, okay, right now we’re timing some of my internet to, to do this as well.
- Yeah.
- Just this is where, so in the Fotello dashboard, this is where you do the new listing. Here’s my listing. So I could see all of mine, I could list customers. There’s a Facebook group, Fotello University for training, pricing.
Over here is to export for MLS or to export for photo, which is for print, which is presently in beta, and then actually how you can share the images with the real estate agent. Did you use this sharing feature, or do you use a different workflow when you share your images in your existing workflow?
- I think I shared it with Bruno on the listing that we did. But I typically will download them and then upload them to my normal delivery platform that I use.
- Yeah, okay-
- It’s a good feature to have that though. I like sharing it.
- So you kind of have a choice of sharing it directly from Fotello or if you have your own workflows, export the images and pop them into your own workflow. We’re at a minute and 20, probably in about another minute we’ll be done here.
I will say that the WGAN special offer from Fotello, go to: www. WGAN.info/fotello you’ll get 25 free listings.
I was blown away [by Fotello]. I’ve been using it a lot this last month. Maybe 15, 20 [listings], somewhere in that ballpark.
Tom Sparks Founder and CEO
Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
A listing comes with up to 60 photos, and they’ll be edited for free when you subscribe to any Fotello paid plan. If you speak to a Fotello representative, just give them coupon code: WGAN But if you just self sign up, www.WGAN.info/fotello
You can start for free. You can then sign up. If you sign up, it’s like a seven-day money-back guarantee. They super-want you to be happy, so, it’s really, I think it’s an amazing platform. Alright, we’re at two minutes and 17 seconds.
The first image is processed. We can go ahead and look at this, for example, and so that was a three bracketed shot, Tom.
- Huh. Okay. Maybe, I mean, I don’t know what happened with that one.
- Do you think you had given me five and I only picked three of them by accident?
- I thought I gave you all five, five brackets.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, I don’t know.
- Looks pretty good.
- It does, yeah.
- Yeah. The other shots used five brackets. And we’re not spending a lot of time going through the workflow for two reasons. First
is Fotello Co-Founder Harman Walia had spent an hour with us on WGAN-TV Live at 5 doing a deep dive demo.
And then Tom also did his workflow in real time, a WGAN-TV Podcast called: “Fotello AI Real Estate Photo Editing Workflow: How to Edit Real Estate Photos in Minutes.”
I think, well, they’re all done, I missed looking at the timer, but it was a little bit more than three minutes including the upload.
And then just to show you quickly that you can change your exposure, you can change your contrast. In terms of color, you can change the temperature, you can change the tint, you can change the saturation. I’m over-exaggerating just so that you see those effects. And I thought the interesting thing here, Tom, was also that you could create your own profile.
- Yeah, I haven’t created a profile yet, and I haven’t even adjusted any of the exposure, contrast, temp, saturation, any of that.
- Yeah. So if you do, I mean, I thought this might be interesting for Bruno, who likes to-
- Yeah.
- Send his images through his own preset. What he might find is just creating his own preset for his profile. But you can see the subtle change if I go from Airy to Crisp to Gold, there’s some change there.
- Yeah, that might have been something we highlighted in the video with him, as he likes to have his images with a little more pop than normal.
- Yeah.
- So he’ll frequently go in and adjust the contrast. And he was like, “Well, they’re good, but this,” and I go, “No, watch,” and I adjust it, and he goes, “Oh, wow, yeah, that’s great.” So I think he would like that.
- Yeah. And the other thing is, let’s see, have I taken it off of screen share?
- Yep.
- I think I want to go back to screen share just to show two other images here. The first is, in fact, I didn’t show you the before, but if I go into the before, here’s one of the bracketed shots showing your tripod in the mirror, hard room with mirrors all over the place.
And then if I go back to the after shot, that’s with the tripod removed. I suspect you probably would send it back in order to get that little piece there, it looks like a little piece of the tripod leg didn’t get cleaned up.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But I imagine if you were in a rush that you could say it looks like the dark wood, and you’d be okay.
And then just to go back to that outdoor shot, that was the outdoor that was processed. Let me take it off screen share. I think you had some images you were going to share in terms of actually showing daylight images that were processed by Fotello and some daylight images that were processed by your human editors. You want to go ahead and share your screen and show some of those images?
- Sure. So share here. Hopefully you can see my folders?
- Yes.
- We’ll go with the human edit. Now, this one we did yesterday, so let’s just take this image, for example, and then let’s pull up the AI version, which is here.
- Incidentally, while you’re doing that, I’ll just mention, Tom has been gracious enough to provide a lot of images to me for doing befores and after with Fotello. And you can see all those before and after examples at: www.WGAN.info/fotello-dropbox
- Okay, so we have human on the right and Fotello AI on the left. And maybe you can speak to the coloring and all that since I can’t, but-
- Oh, yeah, it’s interesting. I would say the human editor window pull in this one looks brighter and vibrant. I would say the Fotello, the cabinet colors look nicer, but without seeing the room, I don’t know, is either one of those the true color of what those cabinets look like? They certainly-
- From being in the room, I think it’s kind of somewhere in the middle here.
- Yeah.
- I would deliver both and be happy with both. I don’t, to me, I don’t see much of a difference, but-
- Yeah, it’s very subtle. And, again, I always come back to this idea, are you a real estate agent? I don’t know if this is fair, Tom, but I think of it as are you a real estate photographer or are you an artist? And that seems like a hard comparison, but it’s like, are you making money or are you obsessing on every image to be touched up again?
And when I look at the Fotello enhanced image, this image and all the images, generally, my conclusion is the solution is either good enough or better than a human editor and it’s coming back within minutes at a fraction of the cost.
- Yeah, and to your point of are you an artist or are you a business owner, however you want to call it, a photographer, in some instances I’m an artist, but in real estate I’m just like, let me put out a good-quality product, I’m not going to sit there and obsess over, I don’t know, cobwebs on the fan or this footprint on the carpet.
I’m not going to sit there and edit this image over what it needs to be. Now, if this was a family photo or a modeling shot or a top music artist or whatever, then yeah, I would probably obsess over the details, but not for this.
- Yeah, I don’t know what you, in California and what your rate is, but, $180, $250 for a shoot for, 50, 60 images, you can’t spend a lot of time or your margin goes away, you know?
So I just look at it as, oh, okay, came back from Fotello AI, yep, good enough. Did you want to show more indoor examples? Or did you want to show a twilight example?
- Yeah, let’s do twilight next, and then I have something else to show you. So here’s twilight, you’re going to like this. Well, let’s pick, how about this one? It’s a nice shot.
- Beautiful. Yeah.
- So this is human.
- Yeah, beautiful.
- Now, to be fair, twilight is still in beta.
- Yeah, yeah, not usable. Or I’d say it differently, you couldn’t sell that as a twilight unfortunately, yeah.
- Yeah, and I’ll just go through, let me just kind of maybe run through these quickly. These are all the twilights, like that’s not twilight.
- No.
- And to just kind of put it in contrast, these are.
I was blown away [by Fotello]. I’ve been using it a lot this last month. Maybe 15, 20 [listings], somewhere in that ballpark.
Tom Sparks Founder and CEO
Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Yeah, those are all beautiful shots that your human editors have done. So I think, as you pointed out, Fotello has a twilight feature marked as in beta.
And I imagine at some point, they’ll nail it, but I imagine you wouldn’t deliver to your client the Fotello AI twilight beta image.
- Yeah, no, no, I wouldn’t right now.
- Yeah.
- Another folder I can show you is, and I was sharing with this with you yesterday, a photographer friend of mine, I won’t name him, but he shoots a lot of multimillion-dollar properties, and he occasionally will do handheld single-image raw shots, no tripod, just holding his camera.
And so I had some time after I did all the regular deliveries I would do for this house, and I went through and did that, and I just handheld my camera, had it nice and level as possible, and did single-image raw shots.
And so I uploaded them to my editor, my human editor, and then I uploaded them to Fotello. And I have interior and then I have an exterior example. So, I’ll show you, this one maybe is human.
And then... Here’s the, nope, wrong shot, sorry. Right here. Here’s the AI version right next to it.
- Wow! Yeah.
- So, super impressed. I, in this case, would probably tell my editors to take a lunch break.
- I wouldn’t want to be, yeah, I mean, have you sent off this, the Fotello image, to your human editor and ask them to comment?
- No.
- No, yeah.
- Don’t want to be the mean boss.
- Yeah, because the Fotello image, and that’s just with a single image handling raw, that’s amazing.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- And so there’s a patio cover out here you can just-
- Yeah, yep, yep.
- And you can’t really, you’re not getting that, so. Yeah, these are just amazing. I did an outside.
- Wow. So the Fotello image on the left side, I would say, wins hands down.
- Yeah.
- It’s like, it’s, you don’t even have to go through some kind of rating score system. You just look at it and you go, oh yeah, Fotello one on the left, way better.
- Yep.
- So, okay.
- I didn’t deliver any of these to the client because-
- Yes.
- We did bracketed ones. This was just purely a test, and I can get through a house pretty quickly with brackets. I don’t know that I’m saving that much time-
- Yeah.
- Single-shotting it.
- All right, you want to take it off of screen share there?
- Sure, sure. Did you want to show the Matterport?
- Yes. Let me tee it up. You were kind enough to send me some Matterport 2D regular photos that were exported using a Matterport Pro3 Camera.
- Correct.
- And let’s see, I’m going to go ahead and share my screen in a second. Okay. Close out that window. Okay. And share screen. I noticed I was looking at the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com] and go, oh, that looks familiar up there. Oh, we’re actually, we’re live in the We Get Around Network Forum at the moment, that’s what’s happening.
So if I go down to this post, “Matterport Pro3 Camera Images Before and After Fotello AI Editor” ... and again, this is Example 5 if you go back and look at: www.WGAN.info/fotello-dropbox So I went ahead and did, I took your image, so here’s 1A, this is the before image that you sent, and then 1B is the after it went through Fotello.
I would say either, again, since you have challenges with color, either one of these could be delivered to your client. I would say the Fotello one actually looks a little better in terms of the window pull and it’s kind of brighter, just looks nicer. If you want to
comment as we go through these, feel free.
- Yeah, my biggest complaint with Matterport and a lot of the 3D tour providers is the window pulls are usually not up to par with what we would deliver. And I was pleasantly surprised how Fotello handled it.
- Shouldn’t be necessary though, right? You should be able to say, “Hey, Fotello,” or excuse me, “Matterport, you have bracketed images that you took. Why doesn’t it look as good as the Fotello AI photo editor?”
- Well, there’s an opportunity for Fotello to somehow integrate within some of these 3D tour platforms.
- Yes.
- You know?
- Yeah, for sure. And Fotello does have an API, so I’ll mention that to Harman. There really is an opportunity, because when I look at this image, I went, oh, window pull is way better in the after using Fotello than it is in the before image that you sent me.
- These tour providers have add-ons. You can download a floor plan for an additional fee. You can download a point cloud file.
- Yeah.
- You just pay an extra $15 and automatically have all your images-
- Yeah.
- Extracted, ran through Fotello.
- Yeah, I actually think Matterport should just be delivering exported images that are as good as what we’re looking at, because, Matterport, that’s the image that you sent me. This is the image, again, I wouldn’t, there’s not that much difference in these two.
And I, again, having not shot that space, I couldn’t tell you if this version where things are more gray is the true color versus this somewhat orange tone.
- I think, I’ll just say that as a viewer who’s looking at a house, I’m concerned with what’s outside and what’s inside and I’m not looking at wall color, because I could paint it-
- Yeah.
- At the end of the day, so.
- Okay.
I was blown away [by Fotello]. I’ve been using it a lot this last month. Maybe 15, 20 [listings], somewhere in that ballpark.
Tom Sparks Founder and CEO
Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- I would absolutely, I’m gravitating towards the Fotello version of the coloring. I can see the shades of it.
- Yes.
- I like the evenness of the coloring from the Fotello image.
- Yeah.
- You and I know that there’s been issues with coloring from Matterport cameras natively. I think we did our secret shopper example where there was horrible discoloration on cabinets and stuff like that, and that just shouldn’t be there.
- Yeah. All right, let’s take a look at another one here. again, the after Fotello looks much better in terms of the window pull. The image looks a little bit cleaner-
- Yeah.
- Overall.
- A little brighter.
- Yeah. I went ahead and did one more shot where I went ahead and did the, added the screen within Fotello.
- Now, the “hurry up and let’s get it done” in me doesn’t like the fact that I have to drag the screen and fit it into place. I wish it could just be like automatic, but I guess I’m just, you know-
- It’s pretty close. Maybe that’s one of the reasons the add a TV screen is in beta. That would certainly be nice, for those watching, for me to add this, I clicked on the feature within Fotello to add screensaver, screen.
And once I placed it here, I did need to just tweak it a little bit to fill it in on the set. Interesting that I couldn’t put one here. I could, I think I was limited to one screen. If I was able to do two screens, I don’t think I was, it would still have to be the same screen.
So in this case, I decided to put it on the PC because this computer, this TV screen, was only partially visible and it looked like it was turned off, and that was fine.
- Is that just a random image or can you select? I think that’s just a random image.
- There were about maybe eight different default screens that I could use. And I believe that I could be mistaken, but I’m almost positive, Fotello will enable you at some point to insert one of your photos into the screen.
So it might be a picture of the outside of the house, as an example. I didn’t put anything in the fireplace. I think there was some point, here was the fireplace, because it was like, oh, I don’t think that someone would be running the fire when it looked so nice out. It wasn’t, seasonally it didn’t make sense for me. But, yes, you could put the fire in the fireplace.
- Yeah, have you ever, how many listings have you seen that are completely vacant but there’s a raging fire in the fireplace? And I’m like, why?
- Yeah, yeah. Well, this one’s furnished, and I think this was maybe the last one that I did. I thought I did an outdoor image, but maybe not. Again, it looks like the window pull is way better than the Matterport exported image.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. So there’s a little discussion going on here. And Ron, in the We Get Around Network Forum, he asks the question, “Would you deliver any of the before Matterport images to a client? Would you deliver any of the after Fotello images to a client? And if so, under what circumstances?”
- Never would I deliver before Matterport images to a client. Now, if we’re talking about other technologies, I’ve had a client who asked me to take extractions from an older iGUIDE system, and I did, but I wasn’t happy about it because the purist in me is like, no, we need good-quality images.
I want to run some iGUIDE extractions, especially now with their PLANIX R1 Camera, through Fotello to see how it comes out.
But at the present time, no. I mean, I have a mirrorless camera, we shoot Sony usually, so I’m going to try to deliver those as much as I can.
And I guess in a pinch, if I needed to, I could offer that. actually brings up a good point. I did a house recently with a Matterport Pro3 Camera, and the house got flooded after I scanned it. We didn’t do any photos, we just did a Matterport for a particular use case.
And the client who hired me called me and said, “Hey, we just experienced a flood. We have the Matterport link, but do you have any photos?”
And I said, “No, I don’t, but we can extract them.” And so there was an opportunity there where I guess that was like the safety net for me. I have the ability to do that now. I can run it through Fotello and give it to him.
- Yeah.
- If I have everything with me on site, I’m just automatically going to grab my camera and bracket it.
- Yeah, I mean, I took the liberty with Ron since I knew you were out shooting today, just to write him back and say, “Hey, hey, Tom shoots either with the DSLR or mirrorless camera. That’s his go-to camera.
He’s not going to use Matterport. That said, I could imagine a circumstance where the real estate agent ordered only Matterport and then for some reason needed photos.” And I wasn’t aware of this particular one, but that would’ve been an example.
But you probably wouldn’t need to have touched up the images related to an insurance claim adjustment anyway. But, back when I was shooting with the Matterport Pro1 Camera, I had a client where they only ordered Matterport.
And sometime later came back and said, “Hey, can you export those images?” And we did, but I, again, I didn’t deliver it straight through Matterport, I sent it out to a human editor.
- Yeah.
- But I would say looking at, what Fotello can do with the Matterport, I would’ve said, oh, if I was doing that today, I would just send it off to Fotello, get it back in minutes, and charge a premium for whether it’s rush or just offering the photos after the fact and actually feel reasonably good about it. I did also indicate to Ron to say, hey, there might be an, a time, whether it was Tom or someone else, where they missed a shot for some reason, or the client wanted some other view, and that was-
- We don’t miss shots.
- Sorry, okay, my bad. My bad. I’m sorry, sorry.
- No, I have missed shots, and yeah, that would be a good opportunity. Hey, I’m just curious, are you offering your publicist services? Thank you for replying to him. I didn’t even see that that comment came in, otherwise I would’ve, but-
- Yeah, he didn’t tag you in it. And I just figured you were out shooting today and-
- The check is in the mail for that.
- Yeah, and just to let him know that, eh, you’re, that’s not, you wouldn’t go use a Matterport to do that, so.
- Matterport’s using a Matterport to do that.
- Yeah, actually, which is interesting, but that’s a whole another show. Actually, we did that show. So I think at this point, Tom, I’m going to wrap it up really just with some notes here, if you bear with me one second.
If you want to check out Tom’s website, it’s: www. SparksMediaGroup.com or www.ScanYourSpace.com, those two sites. Tom has an awesome YouTube channel: @ SparksMediaGroup
If you want to see any of the shows that we’ve done specifically on Fotello, any WGAN-TV Podcast on Fotello, go to: www.WGAN.info/FotelloONwgan
I was blown away [by Fotello]. I’ve been using it a lot this last month. Maybe 15, 20 [listings], somewhere in that ballpark.
Tom Sparks Founder and CEO
Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
At the moment, that includes three shows now, shortly to be, today’s show the fourth show, but you’ll see a show that I did with Fotello Co-Founder Harman Walia, where he takes us through in an hour everything you want to know about Fotello, it’s an awesome show. And then Tom actually does a deeper dive into his workflow, that episode’s called “Fotello AI Real Estate Photo Editing Workflow: How to Edit Real Estate Photos in Minutes.”
And that’s a deep dive, Tom spends a ton of time, way more than what we just did as a quick demo. And there’s also a WGAN-TV Podcast show with Tom about Fotello AI real estate photo editor versus my human photo editors, and that’s referring to Tom’s human editors. So it’s a fun show.
I think it was particularly interesting because you did have a Realtor and professional photographer, Bruno Versaci, kind of on as your guest talking about a problem he had, his need to get the pictures. And before he got home, you’d already delivered them having used Fotello, so that was pretty cool.
And I think the two other websites if you want to see the before and after examples, because sometimes when we publish them in the WGAN Forum our photo compression reduces the image quality some.
If you want to see the original images, you can go to:
www.WGAN.info/fotello-dropbox
And I’ve already put the before and after images of the ones we demoed for today’s show, and then Tom has provided a lot of real estate images, including aerial and inside and residential and business, and they’re also in that Dropbox.
The WGAN special offer is 25 free listings, up to 60 photos each, edited for free when you subscribe to any Fotello paid plan.
That’s at www.WGAN.info/fotello You just need the link. And if you happen to be talking to a Fotello representative, just tell them WGAN. Tom, you were going to say?
Just to speak to the customer service level, I’ve reached out, when you’re logged in to [www.WGAN.info/fotello], you can message, send a message. So I had some issues about something, so I sent a message.
To my surprise, Harman replied most of the time, really, really quickly, super responsive. And one time, I talked to Kay, and she was super helpful. So the customer service, I would say, is impeccable so far.
I have no complaints at all with the level of response or the speed of the response, and the quality of the response has been excellent. It’s not like a chatbot, it’s not like a “here, go browse our forum and figure it out yourself.”
They really are super customer-focused. And I’ve had a call with Harman, and I know he likes to do the onboarding calls with people, and super friendly and just, yeah, a pleasure to talk to. So kudos to him and his whole team for putting this together.
- Yeah, thank you. So you can either sign up today directly, just go to: www.WGAN.info/fotello you automatically get the special offer.
And you can self sign up, you can sign up for a free account, or you can sign up for a paid Solo account, either on a month-tomonth basis or an annual basis.
And where was I going with that, Tom? Or, yes, or if you’d rather have a conversation, you can book a time with a Fotello representative and have them help you understand whatever questions or challenges that you may have.
And they actually also have a price match guarantee, so whatever you’re presently paying, whether you’re using a human editor or an AI solution, whatever, they’ll match the price, and there is a form on their website to do that. Tom, thanks for being back on the show today.
- Thanks for having me.
- We’ve been visiting with Tom Sparks, my Co-Host and subject matter expert for today. Tom is Founder and CEO of Scan Your Space, a division of Sparks Media Group.
For Tom, I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum, and you’ve been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
