Three myths about choosing imagery

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. A few things about choosing imagery that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

“It only matters for big sites”

Generic stock photography actively lowers trust. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

“Our platform handles it”

Every image should earn the bytes it costs. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

In practice

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about choosing imagery before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Generic stock photography actively lowers trust — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.