Photo Rules: Tell the AI Once, Not on Every Photo

Every AI staging tool has a house style, and every house style has a tell. The fiddle-leaf fig in the corner. The abstract triptych over the sofa. The bowl of decorative spheres on the coffee table. If those bother you, you get to fight about them on every single photo — re-running, cropping, or just holding your nose and uploading it.

That's a dumb way to work. So Stylst lets you write the fight down once.

What a photo rule is

A photo rule is a plain-English instruction saved to your account. Not to one photo. To all of them.

You type something like "never add plants" or "keep window treatments simple, no heavy drapes", save it, and it gets applied to every generation you run from then on — every tool, every room type, every style, on the phone app and on the web. You never think about it again. Change it whenever you like; the next photo picks up the change.

As far as we know, nobody else does this. Other tools let you write a prompt per photo, which means you either paste the same sentence forty times a week or you give up and accept the plants. A rule is the difference between a preference and a preference you actually get.

Rules that work

The best rules are short, negative or preservative, and about styling choices — the discretionary stuff the model was going to guess at anyway:

• "Never add plants." The original. The most requested rule we have.
• "No abstract wall art. Framed photography or nothing."
• "Always keep the ceiling fan." Useful in markets where the fan is a feature, not an eyesore.
• "Keep surfaces bare — no books, bowls, or trays on coffee tables and counters."
• "Neutral palette only. No coloured accent cushions."
• "Don't add a rug on hardwood." Because the hardwood is the selling point.
• "Minimal furniture. Enough to show scale, nothing more."

Notice what all of those have in common: they steer taste. They don't ask the model to change the room.

Rules that don't work — and why

A rule is not a magic wand, and the honest thing to do is tell you exactly where it stops.

• A rule can't remove something that's really there. "Delete the radiator." "Get rid of the water stain on the ceiling." Staging adds furniture to a room; it doesn't erase the room. Declutter removes clutter — the laundry basket, the mail on the counter — not built-ins, not fixtures, and never a defect. Which is also the point: a listing photo that quietly deletes a problem is the kind of photo that causes trouble later. See is virtual staging legal?
• A rule can't override the tool you picked. "Add a sectional and a coffee table" does nothing if you're running Enhance, because Enhance is a professional edit that adds and removes nothing, by design. If you want furniture, pick Stage. The tool is the bigger decision; the rule refines it.
• A rule is a bad place to put a style. "Make it look coastal" belongs in the style picker, where it's a first-class control with a whole design vocabulary behind it. Rules are for the things the style picker doesn't cover. The styles are here.
• A rule shouldn't contradict the room type. If you've told it "bedroom" and the rule says "add a dining table", you've written a contradiction, and contradictions are the single most reliable way to get a weird photo back.
• Long rules dilute. It's a couple of sentences, not a design brief. Three sharp instructions beat a paragraph of hedging every time.

Rule sets worth stealing

Listing agent, mid-market: "Never add plants. Neutral palette. Minimal decor on surfaces. Don't cover the flooring with large rugs."

Short-term rental host: "Keep it simple and durable. No fragile glass decor. No wall art above the bed." (Guests notice when the photo promises styling the place doesn't have — the hosts guide gets into why that backfires.)

Contractor showing finished work: "Minimal furniture — the room is the point. Never block the new cabinetry or tile with decor."

Anyone who hates AI tells: "No abstract art. No decorative spheres. No oversized indoor trees." That one rule kills most of the giveaways discussed in does AI virtual staging look fake?

Where to set it

On the web, sign in and open Settings — the photo rules box is right there, and it saves instantly. In the phone app it's Settings → Photo rules. Either way it applies to everything you generate afterwards, on both surfaces, because it lives with your account and not with your device.

Clear the box and it's gone. There's no plan, no upgrade, and no charge for having one — rules don't cost credits, they just change what your credits buy you.

Where Stylst lands

Stylst is $1 a photo, pay-as-you-go, no subscription — a staged, listing-ready image in about two minutes, from a phone or a browser. How it works explains the pipeline; the tools are Stage, Enhance, Declutter, Day-to-Dusk, and Renovation Preview. Photo rules ride on top of all of them, for free, forever.

It's a small feature. It's also the one people tell us they didn't know they wanted until the third photo came back with a plant in it.

The bottom line

You shouldn't have to negotiate with a tool you're paying for. Write down the thing you always want, and the thing you never want, once — then let the tool remember it. Keep the rules short, keep them about styling rather than physics, don't ask them to override the tool or hide a flaw, and the fortieth photo will come back looking like the one you liked.