Photographs You Took and Never Used

The gap

Most trades photograph their work constantly, for their own records or for a customer.

Most trade websites show stock photography chosen during the build.

Which is an odd situation: the business owns hundreds of images of exactly the thing it sells and displays somebody else's.

The reason is not preference. It is that transferring photographs from a phone to a website is a small task that never becomes urgent.

Why your own photographs are better

• They are of your actual work, which is the thing being sold.
• They show your standard, which is the question a visitor has.
• They are local, and recognisable to local people.
• Nobody else has them, unlike stock used by four competitors.
• They are evidence rather than illustration.

The fourth is worth checking. The same stock images circulate widely within trades, and a visitor comparing three local businesses may see the same photograph twice.

How many you actually need

Fewer than the four hundred sitting on the phone.

Two or three per service page, chosen for clarity rather than variety.

A handful for a gallery, if you have one, though a gallery is less useful than photographs placed beside the relevant text.

One or two before and after pairs, which do more than everything else combined.

Which totals perhaps fifteen to twenty for an ordinary trade site, and that is an afternoon of choosing rather than a project.

A worked example

A business with two years of job photographs and a website using the images supplied with the theme.

They went through the phone, picked eighteen, and had them placed on the relevant pages.

Nothing else about the site changed.

Enquiries improved over the following months, and several people mentioned having seen a particular job, one of them recognising the street.

The local recognition was the part they had not anticipated, and it is the specific advantage stock photography cannot have.

The whole exercise took an afternoon and had been available to them for two years.

Choosing which ones

The criteria that matter, in order.

Is the work clearly visible, or is it a photograph of a room that happens to contain it.

Is it tidy, meaning tools and materials moved out of shot.

Is it in focus and reasonably lit.

Is it wide enough to crop for a page header.

And does it show something a customer would be deciding about, rather than a detail only a tradesperson finds interesting.

That last one eliminates a surprising proportion, since people photograph what impressed them professionally rather than what sells the job.

Preparing them for the web

The step that prevents a common problem.

A phone photograph is several megabytes and far larger in dimensions than any web page needs.

Uploading them directly makes pages heavy and slow, particularly on phones, which undoes the benefit.

They need reducing to something in the region of a couple of thousand pixels wide and a few hundred kilobytes, which most tools do automatically and some do not.

Worth checking after adding them, by loading the page on a phone and seeing whether it still feels quick.

And each needs alt text describing what it shows, which takes seconds per image and is frequently skipped.

Permission

The constraint that determines what can be used, and it is worth resolving properly.

Photographs of the inside of somebody's home need their agreement before publication, and asking afterwards is awkward.

The practical solution is a line in whatever paperwork already goes to the customer, asking whether photographs of the completed work may be used.

Most people say yes, particularly when told the property will not be identified.

Avoid anything showing an address, a vehicle registration, a house number, or a person, unless specifically agreed.

Where permission is uncertain, a close crop of the work itself is usually safe and frequently the better photograph anyway.

Where they should go

Placement matters as much as the photographs themselves.

Beside the text they illustrate, on the relevant service page, rather than collected in a gallery.

Because somebody reading about bathroom fitting wants to see bathroom fitting at that moment, not to navigate to a gallery and find one.

A gallery works as a supplement for people who want to browse, and it is not where the persuading happens.

One good photograph on the page beats twenty in a gallery nobody opens, which is the usual arrangement and the wrong way round.

The counter-case

Where stock photography is reasonable.

Illustrating something you do not do, such as a general image on an about page.

Work that genuinely cannot be photographed, whether for privacy, safety or access reasons.

A business too new to have a portfolio, where the honest approach is fewer images rather than borrowed ones.

And decorative use where no claim is implied, such as a background texture.

What is never reasonable is stock photography implying it is your work, which some visitors will recognise and which is a straightforward misrepresentation.

The ones worth taking that nobody takes

Three categories that are consistently missing from every trade photograph library.

The van and the team, which put a face and a vehicle to the business and reassure somebody about who will arrive.

Work in progress, which shows what is involved and sets expectations about disruption and duration.

And the ordinary jobs rather than the exceptional ones, since most customers want the routine work done well rather than the showpiece.

A library entirely of impressive finished work implies a business that only does impressive work, which is not what most enquiries are about.

The afternoon

1. Go through this year's photographs.
2. Pick fifteen to twenty that show the work clearly.
3. Reduce them to a sensible size.
4. Put two or three on each service page.
5. Add alt text to each.
6. Add a permission line to your paperwork.

The sixth is the one that makes next year considerably easier, since the constraint on using photographs is almost always permission rather than availability.

Everything on that list uses material the business already owns, which is what makes it the cheapest improvement available.

How to take them so they work everywhere is covered in the photo that works on social and nowhere else.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.