Preparing artwork images for a website, catalogue or online shop

Artwork photography is the single biggest factor in how work reads on screen, and it is the one artists most often leave until last. A well-designed site with poor images looks worse than a plain site with excellent ones.

This is what we ask for before a build, and why each part matters.

Photograph flat work flat

The most common problem is not focus or lighting. It is keystoning — the painting photographed slightly from below or the side, so the rectangle becomes a trapezoid. The eye reads this instantly as amateur, even when it cannot name what is wrong.

Fix it at capture:

• Camera centred on the middle of the work, sensor parallel to the surface.
• Work lit evenly from both sides at roughly 45 degrees. Two lights, equal distance.
• No flash on the surface, especially on varnish or glass. Remove glass if you can.
• Shoot slightly wider than the work, then crop square to the edges afterwards.

A phone on a tripod in even shade outdoors beats a good camera handheld under a ceiling light. Overcast daylight is genuinely excellent and free.

Get colour close, then say what it is

Screens vary and no reproduction is exact — but there is a large gap between approximately right and plainly wrong.

• Shoot in RAW if your camera allows it; the correction latitude is worth it.
• Include a grey card or colour checker in one frame per session, then correct against it.
• Set white balance once per lighting setup rather than per shot.
• Export in sRGB. Colour spaces like Adobe RGB look correct on your machine and dull or oversaturated in browsers.

Then be honest in the caption. If a red is difficult to reproduce, say so. Collectors respect “colour varies by screen; viewing is recommended” far more than a surprise on delivery.

Sizes: shoot large, deliver appropriately

Send the largest version you have. Do not resize down before sending — a site build generates its own responsive sizes, and it can only work with what it is given.

As a working minimum, aim for at least 2000 pixels on the long edge for anything that might be shown large, and considerably more if you want zoomable detail. Upscaling a small file does not recover detail; it invents it.

What gets served to visitors is a different question, and one the build should handle automatically: modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, several widths, and the right one chosen per device. That is not your problem to solve, but it is worth knowing it is being done — it is the difference between a gallery page that loads instantly and one that takes eight seconds on mobile data.

Shoot more than the flat view

A single straight-on shot documents the work. It does not sell it. For pieces that matter, also capture:

• A detail crop at close range showing surface, brushwork or texture.
• A scale reference — the work on a wall, ideally with something recognisable nearby. This answers the question buyers ask most.
• An edge or side view for deep canvases, so people know whether it needs framing.
• The signature, if you sign.

The scale shot is the one artists skip and buyers want. “165 × 121 cm” means little to most people until they see it above a sofa.

Name files so they survive

File names end up in URLs, and URLs are read by people and search engines. IMG_4032.jpg tells nobody anything.

Use a consistent pattern: title-of-work-artist-name.jpg, lowercase, hyphens rather than spaces or underscores. Add a suffix for variants: -detail, -scale, -edge.

This sounds fussy. It saves hours later when four hundred files need matching to four hundred catalogue entries.

Record the facts with the file

Every work needs, at minimum:

• Title
• Medium — the full description, “oil and acrylic on canvas”, not “painting”
• Dimensions in centimetres, height × width, and depth if significant
• Year
• Availability: available, sold, reserved, not for sale
• Price or “price on request”

Keep this in one spreadsheet with the file name as the first column. This spreadsheet is your catalogue; the website is a view onto it. Studios that maintain one can migrate platforms in a day. Studios that do not spend weeks reconstructing it from memory.

Write alternative text as you go

Every image needs a short description for people using screen readers, and it helps search engines understand the page. Describe what is depicted, not the fact that it is a picture:

Faceless II, an abstract painting of anonymous figures in deep reds and earth tones.

Not “artwork image” and not a keyword list. One clear sentence per work, written while you are looking at it, is far easier than retro-fitting four hundred of them later.

Rights and permissions

If someone else photographed the work, confirm you have the right to publish those photographs — commissioning a photograph does not automatically transfer copyright in it. If a work is in a private collection or was shot in a gallery, check whether you can show it and how it should be credited.

Get this in writing, even informally by email. It takes one message and prevents a genuinely awkward problem later.

The realistic advice

If your existing images are poor, the highest-value thing you can do before building a website is not choosing a designer. It is spending a day, and if necessary a fee, getting the work photographed properly.

We will tell you honestly whether what you have is good enough. Occasionally the right recommendation is to pause the build and reshoot first — and it is nearly always cheaper than launching a site the work does not look good on.