Free Tool

Photo Editing Cost Calculator: Edit Your Own Photos or Outsource Them?

What the calculator counts

• Editing it yourself: photos per shoot times your minutes per photo, plus your minutes per shoot, times your shoots a year. That's your editing hours, and at your hourly rate, what they cost.
• Outsourcing: the price per photo times your photos, plus any extras, is the bill per shoot and per year. The minutes you still spend on each shoot are counted too, in hours and at your rate.
• Break-even price per photo: the time outsourcing saves you on a shoot, times your rate, less the extras, divided by your photos. Pay less than that and outsourcing comes out ahead, as long as you'd otherwise bill those hours.
• Extra shoots: the hours freed in a year divided by the hours a shoot takes. It's how many more shoots the time would cover, not how many agents will book.
• Shoots to pay the bill: the year's editing bill divided by what each extra shoot leaves after its own editing. Fewer than that and outsourcing costs you money, however the hours are valued.

Where the defaults come from

Shoots per week (6), working weeks (48), the hours a shoot takes (3.5, all in) and the $310 shoot price are the pricing calculator's defaults; $88 an hour is what it works out from them ($60,000 take-home, a 25% tax set-aside and $8,300 of yearly costs over 288 shoots of 3.5 hours). Thirty photos is the middle of the 25–35 we suggest for a typical home in how many photos a listing needs. The editing minutes are a starting guess: 30 photos at 3 minutes plus 15 minutes is 1.75 hours a shoot, which leaves room inside 3.5 hours for the hour or so on site and the drive. Change any of them to your own.

Outsourcing still takes your time

Sending a set out doesn't take you out of the edit. You still pick the frames (or bracket sets) worth editing, upload them with notes on anything unusual, look at every photo that comes back, send the misses back for fixes, and deliver. The first sets with a new editor take longer: send a few reference edits so their output matches your look. That's what the "your minutes per shoot, still" field is for, and it's why the calculator never counts outsourcing as zero hours.

Turnaround moves to the editor's clock too. A 24-hour turnaround on a set you upload the evening of the shoot comes back the next evening, and your check comes after that. If you promise agents next-day photos, upload the same day.

What editing services charge

From the vendors' own pricing pages, read November 3, 2026:

• PhotoUp (photoup.net/pricing) sells credits: $1.50 each on demand, extra credits from $1.10 on a monthly plan, and $1.10 to $1.30 in prepaid packs with a plan. A single-exposure photo is 1 credit, HDR 1.25 and flambient 1.5, listed as "1+ credits", so complex edits can cost more. On demand that's $1.50, about $1.88 and $2.25 a photo. It states 24-hour standard delivery, and dedicated editors from $7.94 an hour.
• BoxBrownie (boxbrownie.com/pricing) lists Image Enhancement at US$2, Day to Dusk at US$5, and item removal at US$10 (US$5 for one or two small items). Its pricing page doesn't say what Image Enhancement includes or how fast it comes back, so ask before you count on HDR blending or next-day delivery.

Prices change: check the vendor's page before you budget on them.

Sky replacement, day-to-dusk and item removal change what's in the frame. In California, our AB 723 guide reads those as edits the agent has to disclose, with a link to the unaltered photo, and the agent can only do that if you have the original. So when an editor makes those changes, keep the unedited file, deliver it with the edit, and tell the agent which photos were altered.

If you outsource, update your price too

The editing bill is a business cost. Add the year's total to the pricing calculator's "everything else" line and take your editing time off its hours per shoot, and it will show what that does to your minimum price and your hourly rate. More on the edit itself in our guide to editing real estate photos.