How to Remove Pictures of My House From Zillow

When a house sells, its listing does not disappear. The photos that sold it, often every room plus the back door and the garden, stay on the Zillow page for the address and on the other sites that took the same listing feed. Zillow says most of its photos come from real estate agents through the multiple listing service (MLS) when a home is listed for sale.

Those photos are made to show a house off, and buyers rely on them: in the National Association of Realtors’ 2024 survey of recent buyers, 41% found photos very useful and 31% valued floor plans. The same detail can help the wrong viewer. Police in Riverside, California, told Fox News Digital in 2024 that detectives who searched arrested suspects’ phones had found them looking up addresses on Zillow or Redfin, though, as Fox noted, hard data on how burglars pick their targets is scarce.

The sites’ own tools are for owners, and each site has its own route. This guide gives the steps for Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com, what to do when a site will not budge, where the listing agent and the MLS come in, and the equivalent requests for Rightmove and Zoopla in the UK.

Zillow’s help centre is blunt about the page itself. It builds property pages from public records gathered by a third-party data collector from your county, and says: “we do not remove property pages from Zillow.” What an owner can change is the photos and the home facts. Off-market pages are less visible than listings, though: Zillow says pages for homes that are not for sale, for rent or recently sold can only be found by typing the full address.

Redfin explains the photos. When a home is sold through the MLS, the photos stay archived in the MLS system, and the feeds the MLS sends out include them unless they are hidden or removed at the MLS end. Photos from a sale years ago can therefore still be online long after the new owners have moved in.

1. Step 1Sign inLog in to Zillow, or create a free profile. Only an account that has claimed the home can edit its photos.
2. Step 2Claim ownershipSearch for your address to open the property page. Under More, click Claim ownership, answer the questions that verify you own the home and agree to Zillow’s terms of use. The home then appears under My homes in your profile.
3. Step 3Open the owner viewClick the profile icon, select Your Home, then click the tile for your home to load its page.
4. Step 4Click Edit FactsThe Edit Facts button sits on the owner view of the property page. It opens the same screen that corrects bedrooms, bathrooms and square footage.
5. Step 5Remove, delete or hideClick a photo and choose Remove Photo, click Delete all photos, or tick Hide photos displayed on your home’s Zillow page to take them out of public view.
6. Step 6SaveClick Save Changes at the bottom of the page, then check the public page in a private browser window.

Zillow’s help pages list two exceptions. For some recently sold homes, the Edit Facts screen only offers to hide all photos except the primary one. For some off-market homes, editing is not available at all, because the page is built from the last for-sale listing; Zillow asks those owners to submit a ticket to its support team.

A Zillow spokesperson told Fox News Digital in 2024: “The photos on Zillow come from sources like the multiple listing service that real estate agents use to market homes for sale. We always encourage homeowners to claim their home on Zillow, which allows them to change or remove photos and edit their home facts.”

1. Log in at Redfin.com. Redfin notes this function is not available in the mobile app.
2. Hover over your name in the top right corner and click My Homes, then select the home if you have claimed more than one.
3. Click Edit Photos and tick Hide listing photos. Redfin may ask you to verify ownership with its verification tool first.
4. Choose Yes, Hide Photos, then click the red Save button.

Redfin keeps the first image, which it calls the hero shot, because it usually shows the property better than a street image; message its customer support to remove that one too. For a home that is no longer for sale, support can also remove a 3D tour or floor plan. Once the listing photos are hidden, Redfin shows a Google Street View image of the house instead, which you can ask Google to blur.

Connecticut’s SmartMLS spells out why the MLS cannot do it for you: Realtor.com is neither a brokerage nor an IDX site and is governed by its own policies. To remove photos, the owner must claim the property on Realtor.com, and during the claim process can ask for the images to be removed. The MLS is not involved.

IDX sites are the property search pages on brokers’ own websites, fed from the MLS. Under SmartMLS rules, photos on a closed, expired or cancelled listing are part of its permanent record, and an agent who deletes photos to get around that faces a $250 fine. Since 9 June 2021, though, IDX sites may no longer display the additional photos of a permanently off-market listing.

The San Francisco MLS help centre says third-party sites can take up to 24 hours to pick up a change. After that, if photos marked private still show, it becomes the agent’s job to contact those sites and ask for removal. Rules differ from one MLS to the next, so ask your agent what yours allows.

The easiest moment is before the photos go up. If you are selling, agree with your agent which rooms and details appear, and ask whether the photos can be marked private after closing. If you are buying, ask your agent to raise it with the listing agent before the sale completes.

Police have suspected this for a decade. In 2016, after suspected stolen goods from several homes for sale in the San Gabriel Valley turned up, a San Marino detective told NBC Los Angeles: “One of the things we are looking at is them using real estate websites, Zillow or anything else that shows pictures of the actual house to see if it’s occupied or not.”

If you are selling, the experts Fox News Digital spoke to suggested keeping security cameras, locks, alarm systems, gates, windows and doors out of listing photos where possible, skipping night shots that show where motion-activated lights are, putting valuable furniture and artwork away before the shoot, and thinking twice about a 360-degree video.

Google’s help page covers exactly this case: content deleted from a site that still comes up in search, because the description or cache is out of date. For an image, search for it on images.google.com, right-click the thumbnail, copy the link address, then open the tool, choose Request refresh, then Image, and paste the link. A copy reposted on another website is different: it stays until that site removes it.

• Rightmove. Email ID@rightmove.co.uk with the subject ‘Sold Price Images’ and a link to the property. Attach one proof of ownership showing the owner’s name and the address: the Title Register, the Title Deeds, or formal correspondence with your solicitor. Add one photo ID in the same name, a driving licence or a passport. The request must come from the owner: Rightmove will not act on one from a business.
• Rightmove, afterwards. Rightmove warns that images can reappear if the property is still on the market when you ask, or if it is marketed again later.
• Zoopla. Archived listings, with photos and floor plans, sit under the House prices section of a property page and can be seen by signed-in users. Open the chat with Zoopla’s customer support and ask for the historic listing to be removed. Zoopla removes the listing as a whole, since it cannot keep the pictures without the description, and it does not remove sold price information.

One selfie can reveal where you live lists the background clues to look for, and removing EXIF data takes the coordinates out of the file. Selling the old sofa online? Marketplace photos are one of the classic metadata exposures. And a holiday post shows the other half of the picture, an empty house, which is why police advise waiting until you are home.

Photo analysis on geospys.com is part of GeoSpy Premium, 7.99 US dollars a week or 29.99 US dollars a year, renewing until you cancel (get Yearly). The estimate is a city and a country, never an address. The GeoSpy iPhone app has a free trial.