Website · How-to

Contractor website photos: the job pictures that win work

Use your own job photos, not stock: before and after from the same spot, the work that gets covered up, your crew and your trucks. Get the homeowner’s written OK and strip anything that identifies the house. Then shrink each file, give it a descriptive name and alt text, and put it on the page about that service.

By Eric Smith, founder of Outfitter AI and a former general contractor · Prices checked October 4, 2026

The photos that actually sell a job

A homeowner choosing between contractors wants to know two things: can these people do the work, and will I be comfortable with them in my house? Photos answer both faster than any paragraph. They also show up beyond your site. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, 36% of consumers named an appealing photo or video alongside a review as something that matters when they size up that review [5].

Match photos to pages. The basement photos belong on the basement page, the furnace photos on the furnace page. Google’s image guidance makes the same point for search: put images near relevant text, on pages about what the image shows [1].

What to avoid

• Stock photos of strangers. The smiling model in a spotless hard hat appears on hundreds of contractor sites. Homeowners notice, and it makes the rest of the site feel generic. One real phone photo of your crew beats ten stock shots.
• AI-generated “job” photos. A rendered kitchen you never built is a promise you can’t back up. If you show a design rendering, label it as a rendering.
• Other people’s work. Photos from a manufacturer’s brochure or another contractor’s gallery aren’t yours to use unless you have permission, and passing them off as your jobs misleads customers.
• Heavy filters and edits. Google asks that Business Profile photos be in focus, well lit, and free of significant alterations or excessive filters [2]. That’s a good rule for your website too. Straighten and brighten; don’t paint over flaws.
• Messy job sites. Empty cans, cords across the floor and a coffee cup on the new countertop undo the work in the photo. Take sixty seconds to clear the frame.
• Anything that identifies the home. House numbers, license plates, family photos on the wall, mail on the counter. More on that below.

Shooting with your phone: a field routine

A phone is enough. Teach this routine to whoever is on the job:

1. Wipe the lens. A phone that lives in a work pocket has a smeared lens. Use your shirt. It fixes most “foggy” photos.
2. Shoot the before first, every time. Before you unload anything. You can’t go back for it.
3. Mark your spot. Stand in a doorway or corner and note where (a piece of tape on the floor works in a remodel). Take the after from the exact same place, at the same height.
4. Hold the phone level at chest height. Turn on the grid in your camera settings to keep walls and door frames straight. Shooting down from above your head makes rooms look small and odd.
5. Horizontal for the website, vertical for social. If you’re unsure, take both. Horizontal shots fill a website banner; vertical ones fill a phone screen on Facebook or Instagram.
6. Turn on every light and open the blinds. Daylight from the side looks best. Avoid shooting straight into a bright window, which leaves the room dark.
7. Walk closer instead of zooming. Digital zoom loses detail. Tap the screen on the thing you want sharp.
8. Take three and keep the best. Somebody always blinks or moves.
9. Get one wide, one medium and one close-up. The whole room, the work area, the detail. That set tells the story on a project page.

A quick example for different trades: an HVAC tech grabs the old furnace, the new install with clean venting, and the thermostat; a lawn crew shoots the yard from the same corner of the driveway before and after; a cleaner photographs the stovetop and the shower glass, where the change is obvious.

Consent and privacy in customers’ homes

A customer’s home is their private space. Ask before you photograph it for marketing, and get the yes in writing. The easiest way is a line in your estimate or contract, plus a quick text before you post anything.

Contract line: We may photograph the work area before, during and after the project to document the job. With your OK, we may also use photos of the finished work on our website and social media. We never show your house number, street address, family members or personal items. Initial here if that’s OK: ____

Text before posting: Hi [Name], the [project] turned out great. Okay if we share a couple of photos of it on our website? We’ll only say it was in [Town], no address. Reply YES or NO, either is fine.

Before anything goes online, check each photo for:

• House numbers, street signs, license plates and mailboxes
• Family photos, kids’ names, diplomas, mail and documents
• Alarm panels, safes, gun cabinets and expensive items people would rather not advertise
• Anyone in the shot who didn’t agree to it, including your own crew
• Location data stored in the file. On an iPhone you can turn location off for a shared photo from the Share sheet’s Options, or stop the Camera from recording it at all under Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera [3]. On Android, look for a similar location setting in your camera or sharing options.

Credit by town, not street: “Basement finish, Maplewood” is enough. Those town-tagged projects are exactly what you need for service area pages.

File size, file names and alt text

A phone photo straight off the camera is far bigger than a web page needs, and big files make your site slow on a phone. Shrink them before they go up. A practical routine (a rule of thumb, not a Google number): resize so the long side is around 1,600 to 2,000 pixels, then compress with a free tool such as Squoosh or your builder’s built-in optimizer. Most photos end up a few hundred kilobytes.

Google supports common formats including JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF [1]. WebP is a good default when your builder supports it. Our guide to contractor website speed covers why this matters for mobile visitors.

Four things from Google’s image documentation and web.dev worth doing on every photo:

• Name the file. Google recommends short but descriptive file names; its own example prefers my-new-black-kitten.jpg to IMG00023.JPG [1]. For you: tankless-water-heater-install-maplewood.jpg.
• Write alt text that describes the photo. Google’s examples run from missing alt text (bad), to a pile of repeated keywords (bad), to a short specific description (best) [1]. Describe what someone would see.
• Use a real image tag, not a background. Google’s image guidance says to use standard HTML image elements so it can find the picture [1]. Most builders handle this if you use their image block rather than a section background.
• Load photos lower on the page lazily, not the top one. web.dev recommends loading="lazy" for images further down, normal loading for the first image people see, and width and height on every image so the page doesn’t jump while loading [4].

For your Google Business Profile, Google lists JPG or PNG between 10 KB and 5 MB, with 720 by 720 pixels recommended [2]. Upload new job photos there as well as on your site.

Organizing photos so you can actually use them

Most contractors have thousands of job photos and can’t find any of them. Fix it with one shared folder and a ten-minute weekly habit.

Folder layout: Job Photos / [Year] / [YYYY-MM] [Town] [Service] [Customer last name] / before, during, after, website-ready

File name for website-ready photos: [service]-[what it shows]-[town]-[number].jpg, for example furnace-replacement-new-unit-roseville-1.jpg

1. Pick one shared place. Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud or your job software’s photo storage. Everyone uploads to the same spot.
2. Upload the same day. Crews drop the day’s photos in the job folder before they leave the last site.
3. Friday sort, ten minutes. Star the best three from each finished job, check them against the privacy list, confirm you have the customer’s OK, then resize and rename them into “website-ready.”
4. Post on a schedule. One project a week to your site or Google profile adds up to about fifty a year.
5. Keep a simple log. A sheet with job, town, service, permission (yes or no) and where you posted it. When a customer asks you to take a photo down, you’ll know where it lives.

If you’re still deciding what pages your site needs to hold all this, start with what a contractor website should include, and see the contractor website guide for where photos fit among the other steps.

Common questions

Sources and how we compared

Image formats, file names, alt text and placement come from Google Search Central’s image documentation; profile photo specs from Google Business Profile Help; lazy loading from web.dev; iPhone steps from Apple Support; the survey figure from BrightLocal; all opened October 4, 2026, and the resizing numbers are a rule of thumb, not a published standard.

1. Google Search Central: Google image SEO best practices — last updated March 2026
2. Google Business Profile Help: Manage your Business Profile photos & videos
3. Apple Support: Manage location metadata in Photos (Personal Safety User Guide)
4. web.dev: Browser-level image lazy loading for the web — last updated August 2024
5. BrightLocal: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 — 1,002 U.S. adults; local SEO vendor

Last updated October 4, 2026. Prices change; if something here is out of date, call or text (507) 628-0400 and we’ll fix it.

Related: Websites: the full guide · Contractor website speed · Service area pages done right · What a contractor website should include