The thermal-photon emission from strongly coupled gauge theories at finite temperature via the bottom-up models in holographic QCD in the deconfined phase is studied. The models are constructed to approximately reproduce the electric conductivity obtained from lattice simulations for the quark gluon plasma (QGP). The emission rates are then embedded in hydrodynamic simulations combined with prompt photons and hadronic contributions to analyze the spectra and anisotropic flow of direct photons in RHIC and LHC. In general, the holographic models enhance the yield and improve the agreement in spectra, while they reduce the flow in low p T and increase it in high p T .