Product photos on your website

This guide covers product photos. Having some nice photos on your site can make a really big difference to how professional and trustworthy you seem. But at the same time, having bad photos can make your site look amateur, or worse generic or scammy.

I'm not going to get into the weeds about what it takes to compose the perfect photograph, or talk about cameras or lenses or anything like that - I'm no photographer and don't know my arse from my elbow about any of that. And I should be totally clear that even if you follow this guide perfectly, it's not going to result in you taking photos that compare to a professional photographer's efforts.

But that's fine - your website probably doesn't need professional grade photographs, they just need to be good enough to show that your business does what you say it does, that you've put a bit of effort in, and that you take pride in the work it does. And you can take great photos on your phone nowadays, it just takes a bit of preparation, so if you've got a phone made in the last few years you've got all the kit you need.

Alright, as usual I'm going to talk about some common website photo mistakes up front, and then I'll talk about places you can find images to use on your site without needing to pay expensive licenses or worrying about copyright.

Mistake #1: Bad Framing

Okay so first things first, framing. At a bare minimum this means the subject of your photograph should be fully in shot. This mean if you're taking a photo of a unit you hire out, you should be able to see the top, bottom, and both sides of the unit in the photograph.

You should hold the camera horizontally, in landscape mode, not vertically, in portrait. Use portrait mode for taking actual portrait photos - photos of people. But when you're taking photos of products, landscape mode is nearly always the best way. And be sure to hold your camera straight, not at a wonky angle.

Mistake #2: Bad Location

If your business hires out products for childrens parties, and the products are normally used on grassy gardens or in town halls, then the photos of those products on your site should show them in action in those same sort of situations. If the photos show the products in a warehouse, or an industrial estate, or on sale at a trade show, they're probably not doing a great job of selling themselves. Visitors to your site will want to imagine themselves hiring out your product for a party and it being the main attraction and looking great in the party location - so your photos should show the product doing exactly that.

Likewise, if your website sells yourself as the product, then your photos should show you doing your job in its location - not posing in front of your bathroom mirror.

These photos of your products "in action" should show that you stick to a high standard. If the product need to be secured, they should be secured in photographs. If you need to wear a hard hat while doing something dangerous, you should be wearing a hard hat in the photo of you doing the thing. You get the idea. Don't give your visitors any reason to think you half-ass your jobs.

Mistake #3: Bad Lighting

Smartphones are usually pretty bad at taking photos in the dark. The darkness causes lots of noise, and muddies the colours of your products. You might be able to fix some of this with post production, but really the simplest option is just to take your photos in bright conditions. The light source should be behind you - don't face towards the sun or everything will be really washed out.

Mistake #4: Low resolution and high compression

I see a lot of photos on websites that are really low resolution. To get into the weeds a bit, the resolution of digital photos is the number of pixels it contains - and each pixel is a dot of colour. In a low resolution photo, it can be hard to make out the details, because there just aren't enough pixels to fully represent the item in the photo.

Similarly, digital photos are compressed. You've probably heard of "JPEGs". This is the most common format for compressing photos. Compression discards some of the data of the photo so it can take less space and download more quickly. This is great, but if a photo is too compressed then it can look blurry and blocky.

I suspect that many of these low resolution and very compressed photos end up there because people don't realise that if they send a photo over Whatsapp, or they save it from Facebook, or off someone else's website, it has probably been scaled and compressed somewhere along the way.

For this reason you should try and upload the photos directly from your camera, in as high resolution and with as low compression as possible. This might mean saving them from iCloud, or Google Drive, or zipping them up, or emailing them, or using a USB cable.

I should note that your website will likely still resize and compress those images itself, but that's fine - they'll be sized and compressed to exactly the right size for their final location on your site. But if you send them over Whatsapp, they've already been resized and compressed to display on a dinky phone screen.

Taking a good photo

Okay, so we've talked about some mistakes, so lets now talk about what the process of taking a good-enough photo of your product would be like.

You should use the best camera you have available - which might mean borrowing someone else's phone if yours is naff. The product should be set up safely in a realistic location, and it should be either nice and bright outdoors, or well lit indoors. There shouldn't be any people in the shot unless you have their permission. You should stand far enough away from the product to get it all in frame, and should take a photo in horizontal landscape mode while holding the phone steady and level. If your hands are wobbly you might want to rest your phone against something, or buy a tripod. Take a few photos so you can choose the best one. And then copy the files directly off your phone onto your PC to decide which one represents the product best.

This might sound like a lot of steps, and if you wanted to photograph every single one of your products in one go, it certainly would be. Instead, you might instead want to just keep in mind when you do a job that maybe you should try and get some photos of the completed set-up if it's looking particulary smart. And if you rarely see the completed set-ups because you send your staff out, then give them this guide and ask them to take photos for you.

Buying Images

You might be tempted to just buy some stock photos and call it job done. I understand the impulse, and this can work alright if you choose good photos, but good photos are expensive. Like, you might end up paying more for stock photos than your website cost - a single good photo can be a hundred quid or more.

Stock photos can also sometimes look really obviously stock, which might dissuade visitors or make your site look quite generic. If you do end up choosing stock photos for your site, I would try and buy a bunch of photos from the same photographer so they have a similar aesthetic and vibe - you don't want to end up with a bunch of expensive photos that don't look consistent.

Free Images

You can also find free stock photos - a great site for this is Pexels.com. This might be a better choice if the stock images are mostly there as a placeholder until you take some photos yourself to replace them.

AI Images

If you're considering using AI to generate photos for your site, you should be careful. They're getting more convincing every day, but AI photos have some common flaws that visitors might spot, and which could dissuade them from using you if it seems like you're faking it. If you do use AI photos, you should triple check them to make sure that they don't have any distorted faces, extra fingers, extra limbs, and other AI hallucinations. If the photos don't contain any humans, they're more likely to be convincing, but even then - give them a check.

Stealing Images

You might be tempted to just copy paste images from someone else's site onto yours, without getting their permission. This is a little risky. Ignorance about copyright is not a valid excuse for breaking it, and there's a chance the owner of the image could take you to court for the profit you've made off their photos. Or, maybe even worse, they might slate you on social media or cause drama for you.

Concluding

Alright, I hope this gives you plenty to think about when it comes to the photos on your site. Honestly, I'd sometimes say that having no photo is better than having a bad one. Bad photos can make your site look unprofessional, and might make your products look low quality. You don't have to take professional photographer grade photos for most industries, but you can at least take good cameraphone ones.

If you need help with product photography for your website, get in touch.