Published Updated about 7 min read
To photograph a room for AI editing, stand with your back to the wall opposite whatever you want to change, hold the phone level at about chest height, and take one photo in daylight with the lamps switched off. Keep the whole surface you care about inside the frame, along with the lines where it meets the floor and ceiling, and avoid the ultra-wide lens.
That is the short answer. The longer answer is worth two minutes, because the photo decides more about the result than the style you pick afterwards.
Why the photo matters more than the prompt
Interify edits the photograph you upload. The areas you mark are regenerated, and with no style everything outside them comes back from your photo. That has one consequence worth remembering: the parts of the room you are not changing can only ever look as good as they do in the photo. A blurry sofa stays blurry. A room lit half by a window and half by a yellow lamp keeps both colors of light. A wall that runs off the edge of the frame cannot be repainted past that edge.
It also means a good photo makes your marked areas easier to draw. A wall photographed straight on is a rectangle you can outline in one drag. The same wall photographed from the doorway at an angle is a lopsided quadrilateral that needs the lasso tool and a steady hand.
The checklist
| Do | Why |
|---|---|
| Shoot in daylight, lamps off | One color of light, so new surfaces are lit consistently |
| Stand opposite the surface you want to change | Straight-on surfaces are easier to mark and easier to replace convincingly |
| Hold the phone level, screen vertical | Keeps verticals vertical; tilting bends the room |
| Keep the whole surface in frame, plus its edges | The model needs to see where a wall or floor ends |
| Use the main lens, not 0.5x | Ultra-wide lenses stretch whatever is near the edges |
| Tap to focus, then hold still | Phone cameras in dim rooms expose for longer and blur easily |
| Tidy what you are not changing | With no style, unmarked clutter stays as it was |
Light
Daylight is the easiest light to work with, and an overcast day is kinder than bright sun, which throws hard shadows and blows out the window itself. Shoot in the middle of the day with the curtains open.
Turn the lamps and ceiling lights off. Household bulbs and daylight have different color temperatures, so leaving both on gives you a photo that is warm on one side of the room and cool on the other. Any new surface in that photo inherits the confusion. If the room is genuinely dark without lamps, turn them all on instead and keep the curtains closed, so at least the light is consistent.
Avoid the flash. It flattens everything in front of it, which is the opposite of what makes a room read as a space, and it puts a bright circle on whatever is nearest.
Framing and position
Stand as far back as the room allows, with your back to the opposite wall if you can, and include a little of the surfaces next to the one you are changing. Context helps: a floor is easier to replace believably when the baseboards and the bottom of the furniture are visible, because those are the edges the new floor has to meet.
Shoot from standing height, around chest level, with the phone held upright rather than tipped. Tilting the camera up or down makes vertical lines converge, so walls lean and door frames taper. Most phones show a level indicator in the camera app; use it.
Keep both the floor line and the ceiling line of your target wall in the frame if the room allows. If you have to choose, keep the floor line: it anchors the wall and gives the furniture something to stand on.
Lens and distance
Use the main camera, not the ultra-wide. The 0.5x lens makes a small room look generous, which is exactly why real-estate photos use it, but it also curves straight edges and stretches anything at the corners of the frame. A sofa shot that way comes back from an edit with the same strange proportions.
Do not use panorama mode. A panorama is stitched from several frames, so straight walls arrive gently bent and the geometry of the room is no longer consistent. Avoid shooting through a doorway into the room beyond, too: the doorway takes up most of the frame and the surfaces you want are small and distorted at the back of it.
Sharpness
Tap the screen on the wall or floor you care about so the camera focuses there, then hold the phone with both hands and keep still while it takes the shot. In a dim room the camera compensates with a longer exposure, and a half-second of hand movement is enough to soften every edge.
Night mode is best avoided for this purpose. It combines several frames over a few seconds, and anything that moved — a curtain, a pet, your own hands — leaves a smear. Standard HDR is fine and usually helps with bright windows.
Tidy only what you are not changing
Without a style, anything you leave in the photo and do not mark stays in the result as it was. Clear the laundry, close the cabinet doors, move the drying rack. You do not need to stage the room; you need to remove the things you would be annoyed to see in the finished image.
Furniture you intend to replace does not need moving. Mark it and say what should be there instead. An empty room is harder for the model, not easier, because there is less to tell it how big the space is.
File types
Interify takes JPG, PNG and WebP. iPhones that save photos as HEIC need one extra step: either set the camera to "Most Compatible" in Settings, or export the photo as JPG before uploading. A normal phone photo has plenty of detail; results come back at HD resolution, never larger than the photo you gave.
When one photo is not enough
Take two if the change is a big one. A wide shot shows the whole room and gives the model the proportions; a straighter, closer shot of the single wall or counter you are changing is the one to mark up. They are separate projects in Interify, so generate from whichever serves the change better.
For a kitchen, shoot down the length of the counter rather than across it, so cabinet fronts and the backsplash are both visible. For flooring, include the full span from the nearest corner to the far wall; floors are convincing mainly through perspective, and the model needs to see where the planks have to run. For a single piece of furniture, leave space around it so the room it sits in is still readable.
Common problems and what to do
| Problem | Fix |
|---|---|
| Photo is dark and grainy | Shoot in daylight; brace the phone instead of raising brightness afterwards |
| One half warm, one half cool | Lamps off, or lamps on and curtains closed |
| Walls lean inward | Hold the phone vertical and use the level guide |
| The surface runs off the frame | Step back, or shoot from a corner that includes both ends |
| A mirror shows you taking the photo | Shoot from a position outside the mirror's reflection |
| Hard shadow across the wall | Overcast day, or draw the sheer curtain |
Check the photo before you mark it up
Open the photo full-screen and look at it once. Are the verticals upright? Is the surface you care about sharp and fully in frame? Is the light one color? If the answer is yes three times, it is a good photo to edit.
Two of those are easier to measure than to eyeball. The room photo checker reads a photo's resolution, framing, exposure and sharpness and tells you what a result made from it would inherit. It runs in your browser, so the photo is never uploaded and you do not need an account to use it.
Then mark the areas you want changed and write a note for each. Drawing works with a finger or a stylus on a phone or tablet; pinch in on the edge you are tracing for a precise outline. How to write notes for marked areas covers the wording that gets the result you had in mind, and what AI room design can and can't do sets out where this approach stops being useful.
You can see the whole flow on a photo that is already set up, without an account, in the sample room. When you are ready to use your own, how it works walks through the steps in order.