Wrong and Right Ways to Gather Photos for your Cooperative Website

[Nora McDougall-Collins]

Gathering photos for your cooperative website may be one of the most difficult tasks in starting your site. It could take more time than the actual construction of the site itself. Here are some suggestions for photos that represent your co-op well on your website.

Ways to do it Wrong
• Get a shoebox of snapshots and hand it to your developer.
• Give your developer some photo CDs, which have been laying around the office – especially, if no one knows what photos are on the CDS.
• Email photos to your web developer one at a time over several weeks; so, that he or she has to go back through hundreds of emails to find them.
• Expect your developer to intuitively know what each photo means, the event in each photo and the names of the people in each photo.
• Expect any old snapshot to do – no matter how fuzzy or bad it is.
• Expect your developer to take the photos for you.
• Don’t ask the people in the photos for permission to put them on your website. It will be a nice surprise!

Ways to do it Right
• Make a list of appropriate photos for each of your web pages.
• Plan your photos to support a specific message for each page. Maybe, you will have to decide what your message is first!
• Make a spreadsheet of the pages on your website and which photos you will use on each page. Make one column for the date the photos were actually added to the pages.
• Hire a professional photographer. If you can’t afford a professional, take photos at events and meetings and visits every chance you get. Take hundreds of photos – at least one will be good! Many of the rest will have pieces that are good and can be cut out for accents on pages.
• If you don’t have a professional photographer or a great amateur photographer, send someone to a digital photography class at your local adult education center.
• Be aware of what is in the background when you take photos. A busy background is just confusion on the web.
• Take the photos at a high resolution. The higher the resolution of the photo, the better it will be after manipulation for the web.
• Put all your photos in folders that identify the event or date – before you forget what they are!
• If you have access to Photoshop or some other photo manipulation program, you may be able to lock a caption in the photo properties – do it.
• Do not accept photos from a co-op member unless they are willing to give them good file names.
• Give each photo file a descriptive file name. “Photo 1.jpg” and “Product 1.jpg” and “DCMI122308.jpg” are not descriptive file names.
• Write out a caption and an alt tag for each photo. Remember that these will 1) help the viewer understand more about your messages, 2) help your search engine ranking, and 3) help people with visual disabilities use your website.
• Stock photography is great for ambiance, but not so great for specifics. Your viewers want to see YOUR people and YOUR products!
• Remember that your website is a tool to market the businesses of your members. Photograph them as much as possible!
• Even after you have photos, take new photos now and then. Photos from 5 years ago are great to show a history, but not so great to show that these folks are still in business – or even alive.
• Give your web developer a CD with the renamed photo files and a spreadsheet with the file name, caption and alt tag.

Always keep in mind that you know what your photos mean. Look at your photos with the eyes of someone who doesn’t. I once saw a photo on the front page of a website that looked like a game warden giving a guy a ticket. It turns out it was a forest ranger giving a talk. Your viewers won’t necessarily get the same message from your photos that you do!