Using Vflyer to Create Enhanced and Watermarked Photos

101 Ways to Market Your Home

Browse through any of the real estate listing sites and you’ll find your attention captured by photos that sport bright red corner banners declaring “Reduced!” and “Fairytale Cottage!”. Eye-catching banners are a great way to make your photo ad stand out among the rest on Trulia and other online real estate listing sites. When you use Vflyer, you don’t need any special graphics or Photoshop skills to create your own eye-catchers.

One of the neater features offered by Vflyer is the ability to add a banner or watermark to your home photos. It’s easy to add a banner, starburst or other graphic to your main picture and highlight a special feature that will attract more eyes to your ad. Here’s how to do it.

Log in to your Vflyer account and click on the “Images” tab.
If you haven’t worked with an image to enhance it before, you’ll need to upload one from your computer.
Click on the browse button to open a dialog box.
Navigate to the photo that you want to enhance, highlight it and click OK.
The full path to your photo will now be in the Enhance Image box. Just click “upload” to upload it to your Vflyer account.
When the photo is finished uploading, you’ll be taken to the photo enhancement wizard. Your photo will appear in a pane on the left side of your screen with the default enhancement in place (right now, it’s a bright red starburst with white “For Sale” text, but they may change the default at some point).
The panel to the right of the photo box has a number of options that you can set to create the graphic for your ad.
Select a shape for the graphic from the “Type” box. The graphic shape will appear in the gray shaded box to the right of the “Type” selection box.
Enter the text that you want to appear on your ad in the “Text” box. If you want the text to be separated into two lines, you can use “/n” or <br> where you want the line to break.
Choose the colors for the background and text by clicking on the color swatches beside each choice and selecting the color that you want it to be.
Use the Position dropdown boxes to choose where you want the banner or graphic to appear on your photo.
Choose small, medium or large for the size of the graphic.
Preview your enhanced photo at any time by scrolling to the bottom and clicking “Update”.

You can also add a watermark to your photo as a security measure. This is most often used by listing agents who want to be sure that their name or the name of their agency always accompanies the photo of their property. If you’ve contracted with a professional photographer to take photos of your house, you might even try to bargain for a discount by offering to watermark it with his own graphic or watermark – an exchange of a break in price for the added publicity he’ll get. To add a watermark to your photo:

Type in a percentage for the transparency you desire. The higher the percentage you choose, the less transparent the image will be. 100% transparency is totally opaque.
Choose a position for your watermark from the dropdown box.
Upload an image from your computer to be used as a watermark.

When you’ve finished making enhancements to your photo, you can use it in two different ways.

- To download the image to your computer, click on the Download button and follow the instructions. The graphic will be downloaded to your computer so that you can use it for offline flyers and print ads.

- To host the image on Vflyer, click on the Save button. Once the image is saved, you can get the URL for use in any online project.

- To use the enhanced photo in a Vflyer:

1. Click on the flyer tab and select the flyer you want to use.

2. Scroll down to the Photographs panel.

3. Click on Update Main Photo or Add Main Photo. This will take you to the Manage Photos tab.

4. In the Main Photo panel, click on the circle beside “Image Gallery”.

5. Select your enhanced photo from the dropdown box.

6. Click “Select Image”.

7. Click “Return to Editor” at the top of the page.

Suggestions for Enhancing Main Images

Use a banner or diagonal to announce a price change and attract new attention to an ad that has been posted for a while.
Select a desirable feature of your home and put it on a banner on the main photo. Some suggestions:
- 5 Bedrooms!
- Spectacular View!
- Enormous Backyard
- Finished Basement
- All New Updates!
- Easy Commute!
Use a banner enhancement as a “second headline”.