Edit a Whole Real-Estate Listing in One API Call

#realestate #api #python #proptech

Real-estate photos are a volume problem. A single listing is 20–40 photos. A busy agent or property photographer shoots several listings a week. Every one of those photos needs the same boring treatment: fix the white balance, lift the dark interiors, straighten the wide-angle tilt, and — for the exterior shots — turn that flat grey sky into something a buyer actually wants to click on.

Doing that one photo at a time in Lightroom or Photoshop is hours of work per listing. So we built an endpoint that takes the whole listing at once.

The idea: send a folder, get a folder back

PixelAPI's real-estate batch endpoint is deliberately simple. You zip up a folder of property photos, POST it in a single request, and the response is the processed zip. No job IDs, no polling loop, no webhooks to wire up. It's synchronous: you send 10–50 photos and the listing-ready versions come straight back.

Under the hood each photo gets a non-destructive pass:

Every photo: white balance, contrast, and a gentle colour boost — the whole scene is kept, nothing is cut out.
Exteriors only: the real sky is detected and replaced with a clean blue gradient, feathered at the rooflines so clouds and edges are preserved.
Safety: if no genuine sky is found, the photo is just enhanced — so an interior shot can never get accidentally painted blue.

The result: brighter, consistent, listing-ready photos for the entire property in seconds.

Call it from code

Here's the whole integration. Zip the folder, send it, unzip the response.

import io
import os
import zipfile
from pathlib import Path

import requests

API_KEY = os.environ["PIXELAPI_KEY"]
ENDPOINT = "https://api.pixelapi.dev/v1/real-estate/batch-process"

PRODUCTS = Path("products")
OUTPUT = Path("output")
OUTPUT.mkdir(exist_ok=True)

# 1. Bundle every property photo into one zip (in memory).
photos = sorted(
    p for p in PRODUCTS.iterdir()
    if p.suffix.lower() in {".jpg", ".jpeg", ".png"}
)
buf = io.BytesIO()
with zipfile.ZipFile(buf, "w", zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED) as zf:
    for photo in photos:
        zf.write(photo, arcname=photo.name)
buf.seek(0)

# 2. Send the whole batch in a single request.
resp = requests.post(
    ENDPOINT,
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"},
    files={"file": ("listing.zip", buf, "application/zip")},
    timeout=600,
)
resp.raise_for_status()

# 3. The response IS the processed zip — unzip it straight into output/.
with zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(resp.content)) as zf:
    for name in zf.namelist():
        (OUTPUT / Path(name).name).write_bytes(zf.read(name))

print(f"Done. {len(photos)} listing-ready photos in output/")

Prefer curl?

curl -X POST https://api.pixelapi.dev/v1/real-estate/batch-process \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PIXELAPI_KEY" \
  -F "file=@listing_raw.zip" \
  --output listing_ready.zip

That's the entire contract. One multipart POST with a zip of photos, one zip of processed photos back.

Don't want to write code?

There's a web tool too. Sign in, drag in a zip of property photos, and run a real batch against the same live API — the before/after results come straight back in the browser, and you can download the finished listing as a zip. Same engine, no integration required.

Who this is for

Real estate agents & brokerages — prep an entire MLS / Zillow / Rightmove listing in one upload.
Property photographers — post-process a full 30–40 frame shoot automatically and deliver the same day.
Short-term rental hosts — batch-clean every room into consistent, bright listing images.
Proptech & listing portals — auto-enhance every agent-uploaded photo at ingest, so listings look uniform across thousands of properties.

See it run end to end

We recorded a full walkthrough — real sign-in, a real zip upload, the live API call, the before/after results for every photo, and the same job driven from a Python script. No slides, no faked output.

▶️ Watch the tutorial: https://youtu.be/4lgKyCByMs8