When choosing imagery is worth the effort

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Choosing imagery is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

When it is worth it

Generic stock photography actively lowers trust. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How to decide

Every image should earn the bytes it costs. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about choosing imagery before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Real photos of real work beat polished irrelevance — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.