Job Photos That Win Work: What to Shoot and Post

Photos of your own jobs, taken on your own phone, do more for a local business website than any stock photo, because they're proof that you did the work. Take a before and an after of every job from the same spot, write a short caption with the job type and the town, and have each photo sized for the web so the page still opens fast on mobile data.

This article is about the habits behind that: what to shoot for your kind of business, how to keep before and after pairs honest, how to caption photos so both people and Google understand them, and how big the files should be.

Why stock photos work against you

A stranger looking at your site is trying to answer one question: is this a real business that does good work? A stock photo can't answer it. The smiling technician in a spotless uniform is probably on plenty of other sites, and customers have seen his kind before.

They can also check. Google Lens and similar tools let anyone search with a photo and see where else it appears online. If your "recent project" shows up on a stock photo site, or on a competitor's site in another state, you've most likely lost that customer.

Never post another company's work as your own. Product photos from a manufacturer are fine when you label them as the product, like "the shingle line we install," and not as a job you did.

Google asks the same of photos on your Business Profile. Its photo guidelines say photos should be in focus and well lit, without heavy edits or filters, and should represent reality. Your website should hold itself to the same standard.

What to shoot, by business

Plumbers, HVAC and electricians

The finished install, straight on, after you've cleaned up: the new water heater, the furnace, the panel with every breaker labeled.
The old part next to the new one. A corroded valve or a burnt breaker explains the job better than a paragraph.
Your truck at the curb and your techs in uniform, with their permission.

Contractors

A wide shot that shows the whole house or yard, then two or three close-ups of the details: the stair stringers, the fence post caps, the edge of the patio.
Progress shots of the work nobody sees later, like footings, framing and base prep.
If a past customer agrees, go back a year or two later and photograph the same deck or driveway. A job that still looks good after a few winters says a lot.

Restaurants

Dishes as you actually serve them, on your own plates, in your own light. A table near a window in the afternoon is often enough.
Only dishes on the current menu. A photo of something you stopped making leads to a disappointed customer.
The room during service, the front door and the sign as people see them from the street, and the parking if it's hard to find.

Salons and barbers

Real results on real clients, with written permission. Use the same chair, the same light and the same angle for every photo, so the work is what changes.
Before and after for color and big changes.
The stations and the front desk, so a first-time client knows what to expect.

Shops

The storefront from the sidewalk, the view from just inside the door, and the shelves people ask about.
Retake the photos when the store changes, so the site shows what someone will find today.

Before and after, done right

The contractor website checklist covers the basics: same spot, same angle. A few habits make that easy.

Take the before photo first, every time. It's the one shot you can't go back for. Make it part of starting the job, like putting down drop cloths.
Note where you stood. The corner of the garage, the kitchen doorway, the third fence post. Take the after from the same place.
Match the light. Same time of day if you can, or at least the same lights on.
Show the pair together. On a phone, stack the photos one above the other with "Before" and "After" written on them. A drag slider is fine if it's light, but a plain pair loads faster and works for everyone.
Edit both the same way, or not at all. Straighten and brighten both photos equally. A filter on the after photo makes the whole pair look staged.

Captions with the town and the job

A caption has three parts: the job type, the town, and one detail about the problem you solved. For example:

"Tankless water heater replacing a 50-gallon tank, Naperville. Gas line and venting redone."
"Cedar privacy fence along a sloped backyard, Plainfield."
"Balayage on dark brown hair, done in two sessions."
"Friday fish fry: walleye, coleslaw and rye bread."

Use the town only. No street names and no house numbers. Add a line to your estimate or work order saying you may photograph the finished work and post it without the address, and ask again if the customer's face or family is in the shot.

Google reads more than the photo itself. Its image SEO guidelines call alt text, the short description stored with each image, "the most important attribute" for giving Google more information about an image. The guidelines also recommend short, descriptive file names and placing images near the text they relate to. In practice:

File name: tankless-water-heater-naperville.jpg, not IMG_4021.jpg.
Alt text: describe what's in the photo, the way you'd describe it to someone on the phone.
Placement: put each photo on the page for that type of job. This is where separate service pages pay off: the water heater photos sit next to the water heater text.

Privacy and permission

Look at every photo before you post it. Crop or blur faces, house numbers, license plates, family photos on the fridge and mail on the counter.

Phone photos can also carry the GPS location where they were taken, and for your jobs that's a customer's home. Most tools that resize photos for the web strip that information out. Check that yours does, or turn off location for your camera app.

Image size for speed

A photo straight from a phone is thousands of pixels wide and often several megabytes. A phone screen shows a small part of that detail. Google's web.dev team notes that serving desktop-sized images to phones can use two to four times more data than needed.

What that means for your site:

Resize before you upload. For a photo that runs the full width of a laptop screen, around 1,600 to 2,000 pixels on the long side is plenty. Gallery thumbnails can be much smaller.
Use a modern format. WebP and AVIF files are much smaller than a camera JPEG, and Google Search supports both. A well-compressed JPEG is fine too.
Several sizes of each photo. A well-built site stores a few versions of every photo and lets each phone download the one that fits its screen.
Load the first photo right away, the rest as people scroll. The gallery shouldn't slow down the first screen. More on this in how fast your website should load on a phone.

How many photos

Six to twelve good photos per type of job do more than eighty random ones. Put the newest first, drop the blurry ones, and take down photos of work you no longer do. Then put your best ones on your Google Business Profile too, so people see the same jobs on Maps and on your site.

If you have the photos but not the site to show them, we can build it. We build the first version of your website free in 2 days, with your own job photos sized for phones and captioned by job and town. You click around it, then decide. Get your free preview.