Measuring and Photograph Guide

What we need to make it all happen

Four photos from the four corners of the room, a photo of each piece you plan to keep, and the room’s dimensions. Everything goes into the intake link we sent you, so there is nothing to email and nothing to attach.

The steps below are the difference between photos we can design from and photos we cannot. They take a few minutes and they save us both a round of questions. A handful of optional extras follow at the end, and if we need anything beyond them, we will come back and ask you for it precisely.

Phone photos are completely fine. We are not looking for beautiful pictures. We are looking for honest ones that show us proportion, light, and what is already in the room.

Step One

Set the room up first

Five minutes of preparation does more for the final photos than any camera trick.

Shoot in daylight. Mid-morning or mid-afternoon is ideal, and a bright overcast day is even better than full sun because the light reaches into the corners instead of blowing out one wall.
Turn off the lamps and the overhead lights. Mixing daylight with lamplight puts two different color temperatures in one photo, and the wall color we read on screen will not be your real wall color.
Open every blind and curtain, and pull the curtains clear of the window so we can see the whole frame.
Tidy, but do not stage. Clear the floor and the surfaces. Leave the furniture exactly where it lives, because we need to see how you actually use the room.
Wipe the phone lens. A pocket smudge reads as haze across the entire image.

If you have an iPhone, check that your camera is not saving in HEIC. Open Settings, then Camera, then Formats, and choose Most Compatible. HEIC files cannot be displayed in a browser, so our form will turn them away.

Step Two

Chest height, held level, standard lens

Two habits separate a photo we can work from and a photo we cannot. Keep the back of the phone parallel to the wall with no tilt up or down, and stay off the ultra wide lens.

Side view showing a phone held level at chest height — Roughly chest height, about four feet off the floor, phone perfectly upright.

Side view showing a phone tilted upward, which distorts the room — Tilting up throws the walls out of true and makes the ceiling look taller than it is.

Diagram of a photo frame with straight walls taken on the standard lens — Standard lens. Walls stay straight and furniture keeps its real proportions.

Diagram of a photo frame with bowed walls and a stretched sofa taken on the ultra wide lens — Ultra wide. The same sofa reads longer and the walls curve away from us.

Turn on the camera grid. On an iPhone it lives in Settings under Camera, and on Android it is in the camera app settings. Line the vertical grid lines up with the corners of the room.
Check the vertical edges before you move on. Door frames and window frames should run straight up and down in the photo, not lean toward the middle.
Stay on 1x. The ultra wide stretches whatever is nearest the camera and bows the walls outward, and a sofa photographed that way can look a foot longer than it is.
Skip panorama mode. Panoramas bend straight walls into arcs and we cannot recover the real geometry from them.

If the room is too tight to fit a corner in on 1x, take two overlapping photos rather than switching to 0.5x. Two honest halves are more useful to us than one distorted whole.

Step Three

Four photos from the four corners

If you only take four photos, take these. Standing in a corner and shooting toward the opposite corner shows two walls at once, which is what tells us how the room is actually proportioned.

Plan view of a room with camera positions in all four corners, each aimed at the opposite corner — Plan view. Four photos, one from each corner, each aimed diagonally across the room.

Put your back into the corner. Heels almost touching the baseboards. Every inch of distance you gain is an inch of room we get to see.
Aim at the opposite corner, not at a wall. You should see two walls meeting in the middle of your frame.
Include some floor and some ceiling in every shot. Those two edges are how we read the height of the room.
Hold the phone horizontally for all four.
Catch the things we have to plan around while you are at it, so that every window, door, fireplace, radiator, and outlet appears in at least one of the four. These go in with your room photos.

Step Four

Anything you plan to keep

Photograph each piece that is staying in the room on its own, straight on, in the same daylight, and upload them under keeping any existing pieces rather than with your room photos. These are the fixed points we design around, so they matter more than any other close-up.

One photo per piece, taken square to the front rather than at an angle.
Lay a tape measure along the front edge if you have one handy. A tape in the photo is worth more to us than a paragraph of description.
Add a line about each one in the notes box that appears, with rough sizes if you know them.

This section is for furniture you own and intend to live with, because each piece here is placed on your plan as your own. Built-ins, fireplaces, radiators, and anything else attached to the room belong with your room photos instead.

Step Five

The measurements

Photographs tell us proportion. Measurements make them exact. The form asks for the room’s length and width, the ceiling height, and the length of each wall as you work around the room. Length and width are the two we cannot start without.

Plan view of a room with overall length and width dimensioned and the ceiling height noted — Wall to wall in both directions, floor to ceiling, then each wall in turn.

Measure wall to wall at floor level, not across the furniture.
Note it if the ceiling slopes or drops, or if the room is not a plain rectangle, in the notes on your form.
Measure as exact as you can. We check every number against your photos, so a fraction of an inch will not sink anything.

You do not need to measure the windows, the doorways, or the walls either side of them. Once we have drawn your plan, we mark the exact spots we need and send it back to you with the points lettered, so you measure four things instead of forty.

Optional

If you want to go the extra mile

None of this is required and the four corner shots stand on their own. Each of these removes a question we would otherwise have to email you.

Four more photos, one from the middle of each wall. Corner shots show us the shape of the room. Flat wall shots show us the truth about each surface, which is what we measure furniture against. Stand with your back flat against the middle of a wall and photograph the wall across from you, square on.

Plan view of a room with camera positions at the midpoint of each wall, each aimed straight across at the opposite wall — The same room, four more photos. Together with the corners, this gives us complete coverage.

And the close-ups that save us a round of questions. Take as many or as few as you like, in any order.

Each window, straight on, including the trim and any existing treatment

Each doorway, and which way the door swings when it opens

Outlets, switches, cable jacks, and thermostats along each wall

Vents, returns, radiators, and baseboard heaters

The ceiling fixture, and any sconces or recessed cans

The floor, taken from directly above so we read the grain and tone

The wall color in daylight, close up, with no flash

Mouldings, built-ins, and any architectural feature

If you have a recent iPhone or iPad with LiDAR, a scanning app such as Polycam or magicplan will produce a dimensioned floor plan in a few minutes. Upload it with your room photos if you make one, though please still send the photographs. A scan tells us the geometry and the photos tell us the feeling, and we need both.

Before you upload

Everything goes into the intake link we sent you. There is room for twenty-four photos in total, which is more than enough for everything above, and you can come back and edit what you sent at any time.

Four corner photos, one from each corner

Taken in daylight with the lamps off

Shot on the standard lens, held level

Floor and ceiling visible in each one

Every window, door, radiator, and outlet in shot somewhere

Every piece you are keeping, photographed alone

Length, width, ceiling height, and each wall on the form

Nothing filtered, cropped, or brightened

There is a notes box on the form for anything the camera cannot show us: a radiator that clanks, a door that never fully opens, a corner that is always cold. That is the place for it.

The handful of things that cost us the most

Photographing at night or with the lamps on, which changes every color in the room.

Shooting on the ultra wide lens, which quietly resizes the whole room.

Tilting the phone up toward the ceiling, which leans the walls inward.

Standing in the middle of the room instead of backing into the corners.

Sending only the parts you like, which leaves us designing around a room we have not actually seen.

Tidying so thoroughly that we cannot tell how the room is really lived in.

Cropping the floor or the ceiling out of the frame, which removes the reference we scale everything against.

Filtering or brightening before you upload, since edited color is the hardest thing for us to work around.

"Design made Simple"

pior home