Most agents have never asked a photographer what the living room is doing in the photograph. The photographer hasn't asked either. The sofa is square to the window, the cushions are fluffed, the throw is folded over the arm the way throws are always folded over arms. The room is presentable. The photograph gets taken.
This is staging. Staging is the minimum required to take a photograph without anyone being embarrassed by it. It is a logistical exercise, and most of the property photography you have ever seen is its outcome.
Dressing is something else entirely.
A dressed room has been composed. Every object in the frame is there because someone decided it should be, not because nobody removed it. The throw is imperfect because imperfect throws photograph better than folded ones. The book on the side table is there because the diagonal of its spine balances the vertical of the lamp behind it. None of this is visible to a buyer scrolling at 11pm on a Tuesday. All of it is the reason they slowed down on this listing and not the one above it.
Buyers don't look at property photographs to gather information. They look to feel something. A staged room communicates square meterage, layout, and the absence of mess. A dressed room communicates a life. One is data. The other is desire. Buyers act on desire and rationalise with data afterwards, which means the data was never doing the selling in the first place.
This is also why dressing isn't dishonest. A dressed room shows what the space is capable of being, not what it currently is. The architecture is the same. The proportions are the same. The light is the same. What changes is whether someone walks into the viewing emotionally invested before they have read a single line of the description.
Most agents shoot to document. The work is to compose. The difference shows up in viewing requests, and viewing requests are the only metric that matters.