What is a digitally altered listing image?

A digitally altered listing image is any marketing photo of a property whose pixels no longer match what a camera captured on site — virtual furniture, a restyled wall, cloned-out clutter, even aggressive sky replacement in some jurisdictions. The legal and MLS problem is not "using software." It is passing the edit off as the current condition.

Why disclosure exists

Buyers make offers from photos. Virtual staging is useful and common; undisclosed staging is how people get sued. California's AB 723 is the sharp current example: digitally altered images used in marketing a residential property need a conspicuous disclosure on or next to the image, plus access to the original. Other MLSs and NAR's ethics language push the same direction even where the statute is not identical: say that it was altered, and let someone see the unaltered file.

A caption in the remarks field is a weak plan. Portals crop, syndicates drop your HTML, and screenshots circulate without your page. Disclosure that lives in the pixels survives that.

What Roomersive does with it

On the Studio plan, the export can composite a disclosure banner and a path (including a QR) to the original, unaltered photo. That is not a legal opinion for your market — it is the engineering half of "do not let the MLS strip the sentence." Agents still have to follow their association's rules on where the original is hosted and how the listing is described.

Example

You restyle an empty Dallas living room into a Modern Farmhouse living room and upload it to the MLS. The file should not look like a candid of furniture that is in the house. The banner and original-photo path are how a buyer, an appraiser, and a future dispute all see that it is a proposal.

Related terms

• Virtual staging — the usual alteration
• AI interior design — restyle for the occupant, still an alteration if you list it
• White-label tour — the URL can omit consumer branding; it does not omit the duty to disclose the still
• Original photo — the unaltered capture the QR / link must reach