How to build a strong photo gallery

Fewer Images, Better Ordered

The most common mistake in a photographer's gallery is generosity. Showing everything you have shot is a way of asking the visitor to do the editing, and they will not do it. They will scroll to the end, form an average impression, and leave.

We build galleries of twelve to twenty images. That is enough to show range and few enough that every frame has to earn its place, which is exactly the pressure that makes a selection good.

Give Each Image Its Own Moment

A dense grid tells a visitor to compare. A generous one tells them to look. If the work rewards looking, give it the room, even when that means the page is longer and only two or three photographs are visible at a time.

Load matters here as much as layout. A gallery that takes six seconds to appear has already lost the argument, so we serve modern formats, size every image to the box it occupies and let anything below the fold load lazily.

A gallery is not an archive. It is the case you make for being hired, and cases are won on selection.

Caption Only When It Adds

Names, dates and locations help a visitor place an image. Descriptions of what is visibly in the photograph do not, and they crowd the one thing on the page anybody came for. When in doubt, leave it out and let the picture work.

The exception is commissioned work, where the client and the brief are the interesting part. There a single line of context turns a nice photograph into evidence that you can deliver.

Make the Next Step Obvious

Every gallery should end somewhere: a way to enquire, a link to a related project, a price. A visitor who reaches the bottom of a beautiful set of images and finds nothing to do next is a visitor you have entertained rather than converted.