Most small company websites run on whatever photos happened to exist. A team picture from three years ago, a product shot taken on a windowsill, a stock image nobody remembers choosing. Later, someone needs a photo of the workshop for a new page and spends an hour searching phones and email attachments for it.
The fix is not a photographer on retainer. It is a short list of what you need, a naming rule, one folder and one person who says yes. This article describes a version that fits a team of three to thirty people.
Start with a shot list
Decide what the website must show before anyone shoots. For most service and product companies, eight to twelve photos cover it:
- The place where the work happens: office, workshop, shop floor or van.
- The people who deal with customers, one per person, same background if possible.
- The product or the result of the service, in use rather than on a white table.
- The work in progress: hands, tools, screens, a delivery being packed.
- One or two photos that show scale, such as the whole team or the whole premises.
Write the list in a shared document with three columns: what the photo shows, which page needs it, and who takes it. A photo that no page needs is a nice-to-have, not part of the first round.
Take them so they can be reused
Photos fail on the web for boring reasons. A few rules prevent most of them:
- Shoot in daylight or near a window; avoid the flash.
- Shoot wider than you need. A wide photo can be cropped for a banner, a card and a square thumbnail. A tight one cannot be widened.
- Hold the phone horizontally for page headers and vertically only when you know it is needed.
- Check the background before pressing the button: open documents, customer names on screens, whiteboards, license plates and visible passwords all end up on the public page.
Taking ten attempts of each shot costs two minutes. Reshooting a month later costs an afternoon.
Name the files by what they show
A phone names a photo IMG_4821.jpg. Nobody can search for that. Use a pattern that tells you the content without opening the file:
subject-place-or-detail-year.jpg, for example workshop-assembly-table-2026.jpg or team-portrait-anna-2026.jpg.
Keep it lowercase, with hyphens instead of spaces, and without accents. Search engines read file names as a small hint about the image, and Google's image guidance recommends descriptive file names and alt text. Write the alt text, a short sentence saying what the photo shows, in the same moment, while you remember what is in the picture. It also helps readers who use screen readers.
Keep two folders
Use a simple structure, in the shared place your team already uses. If you have not yet agreed on one, our shared drive folder structure and file naming rules is a good starting point.
website-photos/originals/holds the full-size files straight from the camera. Nobody edits them.website-photos/web/holds the versions prepared for the site: cropped, resized, compressed.
Large photos slow a page down. As a rule, resize a web photo to the widest size it will be shown at and compress it; the web.dev guide to image formats explains when JPEG, WebP or AVIF is the better choice. Keep the original so that you can always produce a new version.
Name one approver
A photo is published once and seen by everyone. Before it goes live, one named person looks at it. Usually it is the owner or the person who manages the website; our note on who decides website changes describes a simple way to assign that role.
The approver checks four things:
- People. Every identifiable person in the photo has agreed to its use on the website. For employees, write it down; for customers and visitors, ask or crop them out. The European Commission's overview of data protection rules for business explains that an image of an identifiable person is personal data.
- Confidential details. No customer names, screens, documents or prices in the background.
- Truth. The photo shows the real place, product or team, not a competitor's product or an outdated office.
- Quality. It is sharp, not tilted, and the file is the right size.
The decision is one line in the shot list: approved, date, initials. If someone leaves the company, check whether their portrait should stay; agree on that rule with them at the start rather than at the end.
Review twice a year
Photos age. People leave, the office is rearranged, the product changes colour. Twice a year, open the shot list and the web folder, and ask three questions: is anything shown that no longer exists, is any page without a photo that needs one, and are any files still named IMG_something. Retire what is out of date and add the two or three photos that are missing.
A first week
- Day 1: write the shot list with page and owner.
- Day 2 to 3: take the photos, ten attempts each.
- Day 4: rename, resize and sort them into the two folders; write the alt text.
- Day 5: the approver goes through the list and signs off.
After this week, the next photo request is a five minute job: look at the list, see what exists, shoot what is missing.
