I Typed a Line Beside Every Photo on Her San Francisco Gallery

This landed in my inbox on a Sunday morning, from a San Francisco client who builds kitchens:

Nobody ever finds the gallery page. It cost me a fortune to shoot and I’m starting to think we should just take it down. Be honest with me.

I liked her for the last line. Most people who email me want agreement, and she was asking me to go and look at something, which is a different request altogether.

So I looked, and the page turned out to be one of the best things she owns. Have you ever had a part of your website that you were about to throw away? Hold that thought, because hers took an afternoon to turn around and nothing about it involved a camera.

What I hadn’t expected was the street around her. San Francisco writes a line for 57.4% of the images I checked, which is 2 of 24 across the cities I checked, so her competitors have quietly been describing their work while she was wondering whether to delete hers.

The page as it stood

Sixteen photographs, shot properly, by a person who knew what she was doing with light.

A walnut island with a marble top, taken from the doorway so you can see the way the room opens up behind it. A pantry with brass handles, photographed with the door half open. A narrow galley kitchen in a Richmond apartment that she had somehow made feel twice the size it really is.

The photos were the whole page. No captions underneath them, no headings between them, just a grid you could scroll through for a while and then leave.

Up at the top, the heading said the name of her business. Underneath that, one line: “Some of our recent work.”

The photo files were called things like IMG_4471, straight off the camera, and she hadn’t renamed a single one because nobody in six years had ever suggested she should.

What a search engine got from it

The line of text you store beside a photograph is one of the things Google leans on when it decides what that photograph shows, and its own guidance for images sets that out in about a paragraph. Alt text is the name for the line.

Type one, and a search engine gets a walnut island with a honed marble top. Leave it empty, and it gets IMG_4471.

She had sixteen empty ones, a heading carrying her own name, and a sentence underneath it that could have sat on any building company’s website in the country.

Then think about the person doing the searching. She isn’t typing a business name, because she doesn’t know one yet. She’s typing what she wants in her own words, and a good share of the time she’s tapped straight over to the images, because she’d rather see a finished kitchen than read three paragraphs about craftsmanship.

My client had the kitchen. She just hadn’t told anybody it was there.

A florist once texted me to say nobody shares a flower shop’s website, and she was half right in a way that was costing her.

When did you last search for something the way a customer would, rather than by name? It’s an uncomfortable ten minutes and I recommend it to everyone.

That’s the part of the email I couldn’t agree with. The page wasn’t failing. It had never been switched on.

The afternoon it took

I sat down with the sixteen photos and wrote sixteen lines, one per picture, and it took me less than an afternoon with a coffee.

Every line said what was in the shot, in the words she’d have used with a customer standing in the room beside her. Walnut island with a honed marble top, looking in from the hallway. Narrow galley kitchen in a Richmond apartment, painted cupboards, brass pulls on every drawer.

Not one of them was stuffed with search terms. A line written for a machine reads exactly like a line written for a machine, and the customer who is listening to your page rather than looking at it deserves a better sentence than that.

Then I gave the page a heading naming the work and the city it happens in, instead of the company.

I wrote three sentences under the heading, about how she works with a client and how long a kitchen takes. Real sentences, in her voice, from a phone call I recorded with her permission.

And I put a way to reach her at the bottom, because the page had been sending interested people back up to a menu.

Four changes. None of them touched the design, none of them cost her a photographer, and all four together took less time than a decent lunch.

Would your own designer have done any of it? Mine didn’t, on my own site, for about three years, and I was the one selling this work to other people at the time.

What surprised me was the street, not her page

I’d have bet money that nobody in this city bothers with photo descriptions. Every gallery page I open for a new client looks like hers did.

Cleaning companies are the weakest at it of anyone I count, and five photos and five minutes will tell you where yours sit.

I was wrong, and the counting says so.

That’s what stung when I told her. Not that she’d skipped a job, but that the people three blocks over hadn’t.

Across the country the figure is 54.9%, so this isn’t a local trick or the fashion at one agency south of Market. Some places have picked the habit up, other places never have, and I can’t explain why the map falls the way it does.

My best guess is that one careful person teaches another careful person, and it spreads through a city the way any decent trade habit spreads, by one person watching over another one’s shoulder.

None of it makes San Francisco a city of brilliant websites, by the way. Weigh the ten checks together and the city scores 72 out of 100, an unremarkable place to sit.

Being sharp at one habit and ordinary overall is the usual pattern. Most cities are good at something and fast asleep on something else.

Reviews are where this city sleeps, and that’s the check I run last and the only one that ever stung me here.

The page as it stands now

Same sixteen photographs, in the same order, in the same grid.

A heading that names the work instead of the company, three sentences that a human being wrote out loud, and a line beside every single image telling you what you’re looking at. Then a way to start a conversation at the bottom, so nobody has to scroll back up to find her.

Nothing about it looks any different from across the room, which is exactly what I like about the job, and it’s why describing the pictures goes near the top of every gallery page I build around here.

She wrote back and asked how much of it she could handle herself on the other pages, which is the best sentence a client has ever sent me.

Nearly all of it, as it happens, and the same goes for most of the honest list of what keeping a website going involves.

Could you do the same on yours this week? You don’t need a developer, you don’t need to touch the design, and clients never believe either of those until they’ve watched me do one.

Your turn

You have a photograph you’re proud of. The one you’d point at if a stranger asked what you do, the one that cost you a day and a photographer.

Open the page it lives on. Can you tell me, without looking at the code, what that photo says about itself?

If the answer is IMG_4471, your best picture is doing none of the work you paid it for. Go and give it a sentence.