The Photo That Works on Social and Nowhere Else

Why the same photograph does not work twice

Feeds and websites want different shapes.

A feed favours square or upright images, because a phone screen is upright and a taller image occupies more of it.

A website header wants a wide image, because a page is wider than it is tall and a banner is wider still.

Which means an image composed for one is cropped badly for the other, and the crop usually removes the subject.

The specific failures

• A square shot cropped wide loses the top and bottom of the subject.
• A wide shot cropped square loses the context that made it work.
• An upright shot on a website is enormous or tiny with nothing between.
• Text placed on an image ends up cropped in half.
• A subject at the edge disappears in any recrop.

The fourth causes the most visible embarrassment, since a caption that reads correctly in one place is cut mid-word in another.

Shooting for both

The habit that solves this, and it costs nothing at the moment of taking the photograph.

Stand further back than the composition needs.

Put the subject in the middle, with space above, below and to each side.

Which produces an image that looks slightly loose on its own and can be cropped to square, wide or upright without losing anything.

Modern phone cameras have enough resolution that cropping heavily costs nothing visible, so the loose original is genuinely a source for several images.

The instinct is to frame tightly because it looks better on the phone screen at the time, and that instinct is what creates the problem.

A worked example

A business with two years of job photographs, all taken to look good on their page.

When rebuilding their website, almost none could be used for the page headers, because every one was square and shot close.

Cropping them wide removed the subject; using them at their own shape left large empty areas beside them.

They had to rephotograph a selection of completed work, some of which was no longer accessible.

From then on every job photograph was taken twice: once framed for the feed and once standing further back.

Which took an additional ten seconds per job and produced a library usable for everything.

What a website actually needs

Different requirements from a feed, and worth listing.

Wide images for headers, with space where text can sit legibly.

Photographs where the subject is identifiable at small sizes, since a thumbnail is common.

Before and after pairs, which are the most persuasive content a trade has and which almost nobody photographs deliberately.

And images that survive compression, since a website version is heavily reduced in file size.

A feed forgives a great deal that a website does not, particularly around detail and legibility at size.

The before photograph

The one nobody takes and everybody wishes they had.

Nobody photographs a job before starting, because at that moment it is an ordinary working day.

Afterwards, the finished work is impressive and there is nothing to compare it against.

Which means the single highest-value photographic habit is taking one wide shot before anything is touched, on every job.

It costs fifteen seconds, most will never be used, and the ones that are will be the most persuasive images the business owns.

What makes a job photograph good

Less about equipment than about three things anybody can control.

Light, which means shooting with the light behind you and avoiding a bright window in the frame.

Tidiness, which means moving the tools, the offcuts and the tea mug before shooting rather than after.

And a straight camera, since a sloping horizon or a leaning wall makes competent work look careless.

Those three account for most of the difference between a photograph that helps and one that does not, and none requires anything beyond attention.

Most phones will show a grid or a level on request, which handles the third automatically.

The counter-case

Where a single format is fine.

A business posting only to a feed, with a website using stock or supplier images, where the two never overlap.

Content genuinely made for a platform, such as a vertical video, which has no website equivalent and is not intended to.

And anything where the photograph is a record rather than a promotional image, such as documentation of a defect.

The advice applies specifically to photographs of work that might be used anywhere, which for most trades is most of them.

Video, briefly

Worth a note, since it follows the same rule with a sharper edge.

Vertical video suits a feed and is unusable on a website, where a tall video occupies the whole screen and leaves the page unreadable around it.

Horizontal video suits a website and performs poorly in a feed, where it appears as a small strip.

Which means video genuinely does have to be shot twice, or shot horizontally and cropped, losing the sides.

For most trades the practical answer is not shooting video at all, since a good photograph does more for far less effort.

Storing them usefully

The part that determines whether any of this is retrievable in two years.

A folder per job, named with the date and the town.

Originals kept at full size, since a cropped and compressed version cannot be recovered.

Backed up somewhere that is not only the phone.

And a note of whether permission was given to use images of that property, which is the detail that stops a photograph being usable years later.

That last point is worth adding as a line in whatever paperwork already goes to the customer, rather than asking each time.

The routine

1. One wide shot before starting.
2. One wide shot at the end, from the same position.
3. One tighter shot for the feed.
4. Stand further back than feels right.
5. Keep the originals at full size.
6. Note whether permission was given.

The second is the one that produces the pairs, and shooting from the same position is what makes the comparison legible rather than merely two photographs of the same room.

Six habits, all of which cost only seconds on site, and together they produce what becomes the single most valuable asset a trade business builds over the years.

What those images do on the site is covered in a builder site with one photograph.

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.