Website Photo Shot List: A Workbook Before the Shoot

You can finish a shoot with plenty of good photographs and no image that fits the homepage. A website photo shot list gives each planned picture a page, a purpose and a crop before anyone starts shooting.

This is for the owner who is about to book a photographer, or about to spend a slow Saturday shooting with a phone. Fill in the workbook below once per shot. Start with the pages and image positions you actually need; there is no fixed shot quota. The example entries are illustrative, written for a made-up remodeling company, so swap in your own trade.

Start from the page, not the camera

Open your site on a phone and walk each page from top to bottom. Every place an image sits, or should sit, gets a row in the workbook. Then ask what the visitor is trying to decide at that point. On a homepage hero it is usually "am I in the right place?" On a service page it is closer to "have they done work like mine?" On a contact page it may be "will I recognize the building or the truck when they show up?"

That question decides the shot. A smiling team photo cannot answer "have they done work like mine." A close photo of a finished job can. Writing the question down first is what stops the shoot from drifting toward whatever looks nice in the moment.

Four useful subjects to consider

Check whether your planned pages need any of these subjects before you book the shoot. Each one should have a named place in the page plan.

The person who will show up

For any business that sends someone to a home or job site, a clear photo of the actual technician, installer or owner answers a real worry. Shoot it in work clothes, at work, not against a blank wall.

Work in progress and the finished result

A finished photo shows the standard. A mid-job photo shows how you work: drop cloths down, tools organized, a clean trailer. Plan both for each main service, from the same angle if you can.

The place customers arrive

If customers come to you, photograph the entrance as they will see it from the parking lot, sign readable. Google notes that an exterior photo helps customers recognize your business when they visit, which matters on your Business Profile as much as on your contact page.

The thing they buy, up close

For a shop or maker, plan detail shots: texture, scale next to a hand, the label. These do more work on a product or service page than a wide room shot.

Frame for the page, then let it crop

Website layouts crop photos differently at different screen sizes. A wide desktop hero can become a tall slice on a phone, so the subject should sit well inside the frame, not at its edge. Ask the photographer for a wider version of each key shot and note in the workbook where the headline will sit.

Keep words out of the photo itself. A slogan painted into an image cannot be read aloud by a screen reader unless you repeat it, and the W3C alt decision tree explains when image text needs an equivalent in alt text, including whether that text is already present nearby. Put the words in the page and let the photo show the work.

Plan for the phone. Before approving a photo, look at it at roughly 390 pixels wide. Details that read on a monitor, like a small sign or a product label, often disappear.

After the shoot: names, alt text and loading

Three habits make the finished files easier to find, easier to use and faster to load.

1. Name files before upload. Google's image guidance says the filename gives light clues about the subject, and recommends short descriptive names over camera defaults like IMG00023.JPG. Use the name from your workbook row.
2. Write alt text from the shot sentence. Google calls alt text the most important attribute for image metadata and warns against stuffing it with keywords. The W3C tree adds the accessibility rule: a photo that carries meaning gets a brief description of that meaning, a link image describes where the link goes, and a purely decorative image gets an empty alt. Our accessibility checklist covers the rest of the page.
3. Treat the top photo differently. The largest image near the top of a page is often what the browser measures as the main content loading. Google's web.dev guidance is direct: never lazy-load that image, and only give a high fetch priority to one or two images at most. Photos farther down the page can be candidates for lazy loading. Have the developer identify the actual LCP element and check the result, rather than applying one rule to every image. Record which image needs the early-loading treatment in the workbook, alongside its page and position.

If a photo will also go to your Google Business Profile, check it against that platform's rules. Google asks for JPG or PNG files between 10 KB and 5 MB, recommends 720 by 720 pixels, and wants photos that are in focus, well lit and not heavily filtered. A selected cover photo is not guaranteed to appear first; Google notes that a user-submitted photo may be chosen if the selected cover is low-quality or other sources suggest a better representation.

Permission and honesty

Anyone recognizable in a photo should have agreed to appear, and the workbook row should say where that agreement lives. Have the person responsible for permissions confirm what approval is needed and which uses it covers. Do not assume a casual agreement covers every campaign or channel; get appropriate advice where the scope is unclear. For customers, get a clear yes in writing before their home, face or car appears, and keep house numbers and plates out of the frame.

Do not mix stock photos into a gallery of your own work, and never caption a stock image as if it shows your crew or a real client. If you need filler for a page you have not shot yet, label it honestly and put that page at the top of your next shot list.