Your website’s photos: real, light and by the rules

Photos do half the work of a page: they show the place, the people, the work done. They also make up most of its weight. And a badly chosen photo, or one published without the right consents, can cost more than it brings.

Four questions before putting one online: is it real, do you have the right to it, is it light, is it described?

Your real photos first

Web users don’t look at all images the same way. The Nielsen Norman Group’s eye-tracking studies show that they skip decorative images and linger on those that teach them something: the product, the place, the real people (2010). On a team page, participants spent more time on the portraits than on the bios, which nonetheless took up much more space.

Stock photos have the opposite effect. In another series of tests, participants said they saw right through these generic images, and preferred photos of the real employees and real products (Nielsen Norman Group, 2019).

What to show, by trade:

• A bakery: the counter at opening, bread coming out of the oven, the shop window.
• A craftsperson: their jobs, before and after, and their team at work.
• A restaurant: the dishes as they are served, the dining room, the terrace.
• A practice: the waiting room, the access, the faces of the team.
• A photographer: their own work, of course, and their portrait.

A recent phone is enough, with daylight and careful framing.

And AI-created images? A 2026 study of 77 American participants didn’t find that they inspired less trust than stock photos. But participants who suspected an image of being generated judged the site less favorably (Nielsen Norman Group, 2026). Keep them for mood, and show your work, your place and your team in real photos.

A photo found online is still protected

Being able to display an image on the internet doesn’t give the right to reuse it. The French Ministry of the Economy’s intellectual property agency (APIE) points out: without the photographer’s permission, reproducing it exposes you to legal action, and photographers increasingly have their images monitored by bots (2021).

• “Royalty-free” has no meaning in French law. Without clear terms of use, you need the author’s written consent.
• A stock library sells a license. Check that it covers your use: a business website, for the length of time you want.
• A Creative Commons license allows certain uses, on its terms: often, crediting the author.
• Your photographer assigns you rights by contract. Have the website and social media included.

The image rights of the people photographed

A recognizable person in a photo must have given written consent before it is published. This consent specifies the medium, the purpose and the duration, and a new use requires new consent. For a minor, the parents’ written consent is needed (Service-public.gouv.fr, 2022).

Your employees are concerned too. The CNIL states that the employer must obtain their permission before publishing their photo, preferably in writing, and that they can object. In 2022, France’s Court of Cassation ruled that two employees could obtain compensation for a group photo published on their company’s website: the mere breach of their image rights was enough, with no other harm to prove (Service-public.gouv.fr, 2022).

In practice: have a short authorization signed that says which photo, where it will appear and for how long. For a full restaurant dining room, frame so that no customer is recognizable, or ask them.

Light images, sized to the screen

Images are what weighs most in a page. On mobile, the median homepage loads 911 KB of images, more than its JavaScript code or its fonts (HTTP Archive, 2025). On one mobile page in ten, the largest image alone weighs a megabyte or more (HTTP Archive, 2024). Every kilobyte slows display, especially on 4G in the street.

The steps that lighten the load, according to web.dev, Google’s site on performance:

1. Resize. An image wider than its frame weighs for nothing: a 1,000-pixel photo shown in a 500-pixel frame is twice too big. Very dense screens justify a finer version, which the next step reserves for them.
2. Offer several sizes. The srcset attribute lets the browser choose the version suited to the screen: small for a phone, large for a wide screen.
3. Choose a modern format. WebP generally compresses better than JPEG and PNG. AVIF goes further, with savings of more than half against JPEG in some tests. Keep a fallback JPEG version for old browsers. These formats remain rare: in 2024, WebP accounted for only 12% of images on mobile pages, and AVIF 1% (HTTP Archive).
4. Compress, then check by eye that the photo stays sharp.
5. Load what is lower down on demand. The loading="lazy" attribute waits until the image approaches the screen. Never for the first visible image: web.dev advises against deferring the main image of the first screen (2024).

To go further on speed, see the Core Web Vitals.

Alt text

Alt text describes an image for those who can’t see it: a blind person whose screen reader reads the page, or a visitor whose image didn’t load. The web accessibility guidelines require it for any image that carries information (WCAG, criterion 1.1.1, level A). Yet 45% of images on the web have none (HTTP Archive, 2024).

The W3C offers a simple decision tree (2024):

• The image informs: describe what it brings, in one sentence. “Today’s strawberry tart, served by the slice” rather than “photo1”.
• The image is a link or a button: describe the action or the destination, such as “Call the practice”.
• The image contains text: repeat that text.
• The image is decorative: leave the alt text empty, so the screen reader skips it.

Google reads these texts too. It recommends useful descriptions, without piling up keywords, short and meaningful file names, and images placed near the text that talks about them (Google Search Central, 2026). A craftsperson who names their file “bathroom-walk-in-shower-rennes.webp” and describes it as “Bathroom redone in Rennes: walk-in shower and light gray tiling” serves both their visitors and their search ranking.

On sites composed by 29webs, the background video is a scene created by a generation model from your description: it sets a mood. It is re-encoded and slimmed down, without a sound track, with a poster that stays alone on screen when visitors have asked for less animation.

In short: show your real photos, with the written consent of recognizable people and a license for anything that doesn’t come from you. Resize, compress, describe each useful image in one sentence.