Which photos to upload
On a tradesman's website, photos are what sell. Not the text — nobody reads that as closely as they look at a photo of finished work. This is everything you need to know about them, and it's less than you'd expect.
Upload the original from your phone and do nothing to it. Don't shrink it, don't crop it, don't run it through any editor. The configurator will do it better than any tool you'd open — and it will do it the same way every time.
What the template does for you
When you upload a photo, this happens automatically, with nothing to set up:
- It shrinks it to exactly what the web needs. A 4 MB photo usually ends up under 200 kB — which is why your page loads fast even on mobile data.
- It turns it the right way up. Phones store "which way is up" separately and plenty of websites ignore it, so photos end up on their side. Not here.
- It crops it to the shape that belongs in that spot — that's step 2.
- It strips the location data. Step 6 is about this, and it matters more than it sounds.
- It re-encodes it into a modern format that's considerably smaller at the same quality.
Under each field you'll see what happened, for example:
If you shrink a photo yourself and then upload it, the template has nothing left to work with — it works from the degraded version you gave it. The result will be softer than if you'd uploaded the original. A photo is never enlarged, so a small photo stays small forever.
The shape is fixed. Leave room around the subject.
Every spot on the page has a fixed shape, so the site looks tidy even when you upload photos of all different sizes. Your photo is cropped from the centre to fit — whatever falls outside is gone.
Only one thing follows from that when you're taking the photo: don't fill the frame with the subject. Leave air around it. Then the crop can't take it away from you.
| Spot | Shape | What belongs there |
|---|---|---|
| Main photo | landscape 3:2 | The best one you have. It's seen first. |
| About us | portrait 4:5 | The only place an upright photo belongs. |
| Services (×3) | landscape 4:3 | The work, not the tools. |
| Gallery (×4) | landscape 4:3 | Finished jobs. |
| Before and after | landscape 3:2 | See step 3 — it has its own rule. |
| Article photo | landscape 16:10 | |
| Map image | landscape 16:9 | A crop of the map of your area. |
| Sharing preview | very wide | What shows when someone sends your link over WhatsApp. |
| Site icon | square | The small icon in the browser tab. |
| Logo | any | A logo is never cropped — it fits in whole. |
That's fine. Sections you don't want can be switched off in the configurator, and the site still looks whole without them. Four good photos beat eight weak ones.
Before and after — the strongest thing on the site
For renovation work nothing persuades like a slider the visitor drags themselves, between how it looked before and how it looks now. But it comes with one hard rule:
Same angle, same height, similar light. When they're two different views, people spot it instantly — and then they stop believing the rest of the site too.
And don't edit the "before" photo to look worse. Darkening it or draining the colour takes ten seconds and is tempting, but then the slider isn't showing your work, it's showing your editing. If anyone works that out, it's worse than not having a slider at all.
The "before" photo has to be taken before you start — and that's the part people forget. When you go out to quote a job, photograph the room from two or three angles and note where you stood. When it's done, stand in the same place. It costs you a minute and gives you the best thing you'll ever put on the site.
What to photograph, and what not to
| Works | Doesn't work |
|---|---|
| Finished work as a whole — a room, a façade, a staircase | A close-up with no context (a patch of wall that could be anywhere) |
| Daylight, overcast rather than bright sun | Flash and evening light — they turn the colours yellow |
| A tidy space with no tools or buckets in shot | Clutter in the frame. A few seconds of tidying, a different impression. |
| A level shot, verticals actually vertical | A tilted phone — the walls fan outwards |
| Your own photos of your own jobs | Photos taken off the internet (see step 7) |
Look at the photo once more and hunt for text: the brand on a paint tin, a sticker on a window, lettering on a van in the background, a manufacturer's name on packaging. Someone else's trademark on your site is a problem you don't need, and you often won't see it until you go looking.
The customer, a neighbour, your lad on a summer job — anyone recognisable has to agree to it. The simplest answer is to frame so that no faces are in shot. Hands at work read very well and carry no such problem.
The photo description — one sentence worth writing
Every photo has a description field. It looks like a formality, but it does two jobs at once:
- A blind visitor has the page read aloud and hears exactly what you wrote there. With no description, they hear silence.
- Google uses it for image search. People search for "painted kitchen" and look at the pictures.
How to write it: say what you can actually see in the photo, the way you'd say it over the phone to someone who isn't there. One sentence is enough.
| Description | |
|---|---|
| bad | image1 · IMG_2451 · photo |
| weak | painting — true, but it says nothing |
| good | repainted living room in a family home after renovation |
| bad in another way | painter painting flat house cheap fast Den Haag — keyword stuffing; Google treats it as spam |
Before packaging it lists the photos with no description or a weak one, and says why. You can go back and fill them in, or say they're decorative and carry on. Nothing is blocked. A decorative photo without a description is fine — the mistake is forgetting one that says something.
The description has a side effect too: it also names the file on your site. IMG_2451.jpg becomes repainted-living-room-after-renovation.webp, which Google notices as well. Free, for one sentence.
Privacy — the part most people don't know about
Your phone writes the coordinates of where the photo was taken into every photo. You can't see it, but it's there.
Which means that if you put your job photos online as they are, you'd be publishing your customers' addresses — with no idea you'd done it. Anyone who knows where to look reads them in seconds.
The configurator discards all of it when it re-encodes the photo. It isn't a setting you could forget to switch on — it follows from how the photo is processed. Verified on the actual output files in all three browsers.
So there's nothing for you to do. It's worth knowing about all the same — it's one of the reasons you're uploading these photos here rather than straight to somewhere else.
Only the shrunken versions stay in the package — the ones the site needs. Keep the originals from your phone the way you keep everything else. If you ever want a different shape or a larger photo, you start from the original, not from what's on the site.
Photos that aren't yours
The download contains grey placeholder images in the right sizes, not photos. The photos you see in the online demo come from Unsplash and are shown there only as an example — Unsplash's licence doesn't allow us to pass them on, so they aren't in the package.
And let's be straight about it: even if they were, someone else's photos are not your work. A visitor won't spot that they're stock, but they will notice the site looks like a catalogue. A tradesman's site without its own photos loses the one thing that sets it apart from the competition.
Replace the placeholders with your own photos — the steps above are all you need.
Don't take photos from Google, from competitors' sites, or from stock libraries without a licence. It isn't only bad manners — the owner can come after you for payment, and with stock libraries that's done by firms which do nothing else. The bill is usually higher than you'd expect.
When you really have no photo of your own, there are sites with free photos that may be used commercially — Unsplash or Pexels, for instance. The photos in our online demos come from there.
A check before you hand it over
Once the photos are in, go through these six. It takes two minutes and it's the last moment when fixing any of it is easy.
- Is the main photo the best one I have?
- Is there anyone else's lettering or logo in any shot?
- Has everyone recognisable in the photos agreed to it?
- Is the before/after pair from the same spot?
- Does every photo that says something have a one-sentence description?
- Are my originals stored somewhere outside the package?
Write to support@maxitemplates.com and send us the photos you're hesitating over. Telling you which of three photos belongs at the top is a minute's work — and the difference shows on the site for years.