SqwarkPic

The story

Seven resorts, three days, 1,468 photos.

By Stuart, who built SqwarkPic · Phi Phi, 4 to 6 September 2026

The Phi Phi photos on this site aren't mine, and they aren't of my place. I've run short-term rentals and listed places myself, which is where the headache came from, but this set belongs to a friend who went out there to photograph resorts. What came back is the set SqwarkPic was built to get through, so it seems fair to say where it came from.

The brief

Several resorts to cover, and a fixed number of days to cover them in. It ended up being seven properties and thirty different room types between them, plus the pools, the grounds and the bits in between.

Thirty room types is the number that does the damage. A listing sells a room type, so each one wants its own set: the bed, the bathroom, the view off the balcony, whatever makes it different from the room next door. And no going back if one of them didn't come out.

Before Before: a thatched cottage seen from a balcony, foliage and sky both looking flat and washed out.
After After: the same thatched cottage with the sky and the foliage holding their colour.
Exterior, from a friend's shoot, Phi Phi, 4 September 2026. Sky and foliage saturation lifted. Same cottage, same balcony, same afternoon.

What low season did to it

Low season is why the trip was possible and why the plan didn't survive. The weather doesn't do forecasts in low season, it does moods. It rained.

The schedule was still the schedule. You shoot the west-facing pool at eleven in the morning because eleven in the morning is when you are standing at it, and you shoot the dark bedroom under cloud because cloud is what there is. Then you do the next resort. Nobody got to wait for the light.

So a good part of the set is technically fine and quietly wrong. Flat white sky over decent architecture. Grey water in a pool that isn't grey.

Before Before: a pool with two rings in it, shot from the roof above, the water and the planting round it looking flat.
After After: the same pool from the same spot, the water deeper in colour and the planting greener.
Rooftop pool, 4 September 2026. Flat overcast, shot from the roof above it, no sky in the frame at all. The water gets its depth back and the planting its colour. This is the wrong hour of the wrong day, recovered as far as it honestly goes.
Before Before: an infinity pool over the bay, the sky and the water both a little flat, haze across the far hills.
After After: the same infinity pool with the sky holding blue, the sea turquoise and the far hills clear of haze.
Infinity pool, 4 September 2026. Sky and pool tile both gain saturation and the haze comes off the far hills. Nothing added, nothing replaced.

What came home

1,468 photos over three days, in folders dated 4, 5 and 6 September 2026. Three folders of camera filenames in shooting order, which is to say in no order at all: half a bathroom, a corridor, a balcony, four more of that bathroom.

I got sent the lot.

Before Before: a bedroom lined with wood panelling, the panels and the door reading dull and grey-brown.
After After: the same bedroom with the wood panelling warmer and the door's grain visible.
Bedroom, 4 September 2026. Warmer, more saturated panel wood, and the grain in the door comes back. The room was always this colour. The phone wasn't sure.

The problem was never the editing

Brightening a photo takes seconds and everybody knows how. Doing it 1,468 times is a different thing, but it is still only tedium.

The actual problem was two questions, asked 1,468 times. Which room is this? And is this the best frame of it?

The second is worse than it sounds. Nobody photographs a bed once. You get a burst of six or eight, half a metre apart, one of them sharp and the rest a fraction soft. At thumbnail size they are identical. At full size you are opening files one at a time and trying to hold the last one in your head. Thirty room types of that.

Before Before: a room with a daybed and twin beds, the wood floor grey and the linen slightly off-white.
After After: the same room with a warmer wood floor and cleaner whites on the linen.
Daybed and twin beds, 5 September 2026. Warmer wood floor, cleaner whites on the linen. Thirty room types across seven properties, and a lot of them are a room with beds in it, which is exactly why they had to be sorted before they could be picked.

What the app did with it

I had been building SqwarkPic for roughly this, for me and the people I know who list places, and this was the set that told me whether it worked.

Drop the three folders on it. It groups the photos by room, so thirty room types come out as thirty piles instead of three date folders. It flags the near-identical bursts and marks the sharpest frame in each, so picking the keeper is one look instead of eight files opened side by side. Then it lifts the shadows, fixes white balance, straightens what's off, and brings the sky back up out of the file it was always in.

It auto-categorises the pictures, tells you which is the best one, generally enhances them, and keeps the thing that matters most, which is that they are still legitimately real photos of the place.

Before Before: a plain tiled shower stall sitting in shadow, the grout and the back wall barely readable.
After After: the same shower stall with the shadow lifted, the tile and the grout now visible.
Shower room, 4 September 2026. Shadow lift, and that's all. The least photogenic room in any resort is also the one a guest scrolls back to.

What it deliberately didn't do

None of the above invents anything. The sky control raises the exposure of the sky already in your frame. There is no second sky, no model painting in pixels, no furniture appearing in an empty room, no hose edited off the terrace.

That limit costs something, and this set is where I found out how much. There are frames in it that no honest edit will save: it was raining, and there is nothing in the file to bring back. Those stayed bad and got dropped. The alternative is a set the place doesn't live up to when somebody opens the door, which isn't solving the problem, it's moving it.

Before Before: a pool on a hillside with the tile and the deck reading a dull blue and the hills behind it muted.
After After: the same hillside pool with richer tile and deck blue and more saturated greens on the hills.
Hillside pool, 5 September 2026. Pool tile and deck both richer, hill greens more saturated. The clouds in the after are the clouds that were there.

What it looked like at the end

Thirty room folders instead of three date folders. One keeper per angle. A set that looks like those resorts on a decent day rather than a fabricated one.

The rain is still in some of them. An overcast afternoon is still an overcast afternoon, only now it's one where the pool is the colour it actually was. That was the whole ask: somebody else's three days, 1,468 files, and an app whose only job was to turn that into an evening instead of a fortnight.

Before Before: a rocky shoreline seen from a balcony, the sea a flat teal and the sky low in contrast.
After After: the same shoreline with the sea a vivid turquoise and more contrast in the sky.
Balcony sea view, 4 September 2026. The sea goes from flat teal to the turquoise it is when you are stood on that balcony, and the sky picks up contrast. This one is the whole argument in a single frame.

More guides: All guides · Why your room photos come out dark · AI-edited listing photos