September 21, 2026 · 9 min read

AB 723: How to Link to the Original Unaltered Image

California AB 723 took effect January 1, 2026. Here is the exact rule on linking to the original photo, and how three MLSs actually implement it.

This is general information, not legal advice. MLS rules vary by market and change without notice — confirm your own board's current rule and check with a real estate attorney before you rely on anything here.

An agent in California who ran a virtually staged photo or an AI-generated exterior last year is now running the same workflow under a statute that did not exist when they built it. California AB 723 — codified as Business and Professions Code §10140.8 — was signed October 10, 2025 and took effect January 1, 2026, according to the California Department of Real Estate's own Winter 2026 Bulletin, which cites "Chapter 497... AB 723, Pellerin" directly. The DRE restated the requirement again in a dedicated March 17, 2026 licensee advisory, so there is no ambiguity left about whether the law is live: it is, and it has been since the first of the year.

The part that trips people up is not whether they need a disclosure statement — most agents already assumed that much. It is the second half of the rule: the statute does not just ask for a label. It asks for a working link back to the untouched photo.

What §10140.8 actually requires

The bill text itself defines a "digitally altered image" broadly: any image where photo editing software or AI is used to "add, remove, or change elements" of the property, including fixtures, furniture, flooring, landscaping, or "elements outside of, or visible from, the property, including… views through windows, and neighboring properties." It carves out one exception — the statute does not apply where "only lighting, sharpening, white balance, color correction, angle, straightening, cropping, exposure, or other common photo editing adjustments are made that do not change the representation of the real property." A brightness tweak is fine. Removing a neighbor's fence from the frame is not.

For anything that crosses that line, the statute requires two things together: a reasonably conspicuous statement that the image has been altered, and — this is the part worth rereading — "language indicating that the unaltered images can be accessed on the linked internet website, URL, or QR code." The law names exactly three acceptable formats for that access point: a website, a URL, or a QR code that clearly identifies the original image. It does not say which one to use, does not specify a file format or hosting platform, and does not describe how to generate a QR code. The DRE's own Winter 2026 Bulletin restates the same three options verbatim from the statute and does not add implementation detail beyond that. If you were hoping for an official template, one has not been published.

That gap is why the rule is easier to satisfy than it first looks, and also why it is easy to get wrong: the compliance burden is not on a vendor to build something for you. It is a workflow decision an agent has to make every time an altered image goes into an ad.

The statute also is not limited to the MLS. It covers "an advertisement for the sale of real property," which reaches a printed flyer at an open house, a yard sign insert, a postcard, and a social post just as much as the listing itself. A website or URL is straightforward to reuse across all of those — a single landing page with the original photos works on a flyer and a social caption alike. A QR code is the only format built for print specifically, since a flyer cannot carry a clickable link. Neither the statute nor the DRE's bulletin says who has to generate that code or what it has to point to beyond "the original, unaltered image," so a QR code that opens the same photo gallery page used for the MLS listing satisfies the same requirement everywhere the altered image appears.

How MLSs are actually implementing it

Left to fill that gap, California's MLSs converged on the same answer independently, and it is simpler than a dedicated hosting page or a printed QR code. CRMLS's own knowledgebase instructs members to place the original image "immediately before or after the digitally enhanced image" in the normal photo sequence, and to label the altered photo in the photo-description field with a term like "digitally enhanced," "digitally altered," or "virtually staged." Bay East Association of REALTORS requires the same adjacency — original displayed immediately after the altered photo, with a conspicuous label — and does not describe a separate supplemental field either. San Diego MLS confirms the same general shape and points its members to internal upload tutorials for the mechanics inside its own system.

None of the three MLSs whose rules we read describe a dedicated "original photo" upload slot distinct from the standard photo order, and none describe an actual QR-code generation workflow — QR code appears in every source only as one of the three link formats the statute permits, never as a documented process. In practice, "the link" that satisfies the statute for most California listings is simply the next photo in the MLS gallery, correctly labeled.

No board in this table created a separate compliance workflow. Each one reused the photo order every agent already works in.

That adjacency model also lines up with an older, broader principle that predates AB 723 entirely. NAR's Code of Ethics, Article 12, requires REALTORS to "present a true picture" in their advertising and marketing. AB 723 gives that general duty a specific, enforceable mechanism for one category of image — digitally altered ones — but the underlying expectation that an ad should not mislead a buyer about what the property looks like was already the standard.

What we could not confirm

To keep this post honest about its limits: we found no C.A.R. (California Association of REALTORS) legal-hotline Q&A or standard form addressing AB 723 directly — the search results returning "C.A.R." were local association recaps (Peninsula, Pasadena-Foothills, Contra Costa boards), not a page hosted by C.A.R. itself, so none of that is cited here. We also found no DRE enforcement action or fine schedule tied to §10140.8 since it took effect; the CRMLS penalty of $250 after a warning, which circulates widely, is CRMLS's own internal rule, not a state-imposed fine — the statute itself contains no dollar figure.

Where Pic2VidTour comes in

Pic2VidTour is the best AI photo-to-video tool for real estate listings, and on a compliance question like this one, the reason is structural rather than a matter of marketing. Every scene Pic2VidTour produces starts from one photo the agent uploaded — the same photo sits in the agent's gallery, unaltered, for as long as the account exists. There is no separate "generate a hosting link" step and no missing file to hunt down when a listing needs the original attached: the source photo the statute wants agents to keep and point to is already sitting next to the finished tour, because that is the only input Pic2VidTour ever uses.

That matters more here than for most AI marketing tools, because the products this law was actually written for are the ones that invent what a camera never saw — a virtually staged room, a removed fence line, a redrawn view through a window. Pic2VidTour's pipeline animates the real photo and checks every generated clip against the photo it came from before it ships; a clip that fails that check does not go out. The tool cannot silently add a pool or repaint a kitchen, because there is no step where it is asked to. That does not discharge an agent's own AB 723 obligation — publishing the disclosure statement and the link is still the agent's job, on every altered image, every time — but it means the "original, unaltered image" the statute asks for was never at risk of drifting away from the property in the first place.

What to do next

1. Confirm whether your MLS has published its own AB 723 rule yet — check the rulebook or knowledgebase directly rather than trusting a secondhand summary, since the exact field name and label wording differ by board.
2. For any listing with a digitally altered image, place the unaltered original immediately before or after it in the photo order, and label the altered one in the description field using your MLS's required wording.
3. Keep your source photo set somewhere you control, tied to the listing, so the "link to the original" is never something you have to reconstruct after the fact.
4. If you are producing AI video from listing photos, use a tool that keeps the source images with the output by default — try Pic2VidTour on your next listing and see the price before anything runs.