Photos are a very important element of any site design. They can show a product in detail, convey emotions, set a tone or convey emotions. However, make sure your photos are as professional as possible so as to leave a good impression of your brand. You need to take time to choose relevant and quality photos which will make your site design appear more visually attractive.
Here are some guidelines which will help you use photos effectively on your site.
1. Use realistic photos
Taking photos of your own staff, products or clients is always the best option. However, if you can’t afford a custom shoot, you could settle for royalty free or stock photos. Make sure these photos are a realistic representation of your brand, employees or business. Exaggerated photos might lead to the loss of credibility for your site.
2. Avoid cliché photos
Since royalty-free photos can be used by anyone, they are likely to be found all over the internet. Using such images on your site will not make your brand or business stand out from others in the industry. To create a unique identity, it would be advisable to buy unique photos from stock photography sites. Again, if you can afford it, custom photography is the best option.
3. Crop images
You don’t have to use a photo on your site in its exact shape and size. Trimming the edges (cropping) is important for drawing attention to the most vital part of a photo. It ensures that all irrelevant and distracting elements of an image are cut out.
4. Experiment with different shapes
Most photos come in a rectangular shape. You can make your photos stand out by cropping them into an unconventional shape. Some of the ideas you could explore are round, square or wide and panoramic photos. You can find many kinds of photo software in the market which can be used to accomplish this.
5. Make sure the photos are sharp
Many business owners opt to use their own cameras to take photos for their site. If you choose to take your own photos of people, locations or products, make sure they are not out of focus or blurry. Using poor quality photos on your site will make you appear unprofessional. Besides, such photos are almost impossible to rectify, and will therefore be of no use to your site.
6. Keep the resolution low
Photos with a very high resolution are heavy and thus take a longer time to load. Most web users are impatient and are likely to click away when a web page takes too long to load. Therefore, before uploading your images, take time to crop your images and lower the resolution.
Do you use images on your blog? We would love to hear from you via comments.
Shalu Sharma
Good tips on using photos on blog posts. I think relevant photos are important. Most of the time specially in the blogging niche, I see photos are not associated with the post and bloggers are using random photos, makes no sense. Good advice.
Nishant Srivastava
Hi Charles,
Useful post for newbies, one more guideline should be giving credit to the owner of the Image, many new bloggers use images from Google Images and when they apply for adsense they get copyright violation in response, because they have original content but copyrighted Images.
Thanks for the Post!!
Charles Mburugu
Hey Nishant. Indeed, bloggers need to always watch out for copyright violation when using images. Thanks for sharing!
Sugandha Agarwal
Hello Charles ,
Really Very Good Tips to choose correct Pics for our blog posts!
As we all know the pics are the most imp for any post and that can help any post to reach a new level..this will really help !!
Thanks a bunch buddy for these tips!
Happy Blogging!
~Sugandha!
Charles Mburugu
You are welcome Sugandha
Nikhil
It’s important to add photo in blog post because post become more attractive.
One question for you, Is there add image credit below image is necessary?
Srikanth
Hi Charles,
Photos gives the half meaning of our blog Post 
This is really helpful for New Bloggers 
Thanks For the Tips 
Thanks For Sharing 
Photos makes make our photo bit Interesting for our readers to stick our posts
Charles Mburugu
Hey Srikanth, thanks for stopping by. Glad you found the post helpful.
Tarun
Nice tips Charles.
Using self clicked photos and unique photos from the online stock photography sites are the best way to have good photos for a site.
Thanks for sharing your tips with us.
Frank D
Great tips. We only use original photos also. This makes the site look unique. We also like to ad links through the photos
Abhishek Shukla
Very useful post to find good images for the post. Right images can really enhance the post