Which Photos Belong on a Cafe Website and How to Use Them
I've looked through a lot of cafe websites over the years, and the ones that feel wrong almost always have the same problem. Either there are no real photos of the actual place, or there are a handful of stock images that could belong to any shop in any city. Short answer: a cafe site needs a short set of real photos, the room, the counter, the drinks, the people, the front door, sized properly and described honestly, and stock or borrowed images are a real risk, both to how much a customer trusts what they're looking at and to whether you actually had the right to use that photo in the first place.
This is a shot list and a plan, not a lecture on camera gear. You can build this with a phone, an afternoon, and the list below.
What a Bag Store or Brochure Site Tends to Get Wrong
Our own audit work, done across a set of Southeast cafes a few years back now, found the same pattern showing up again and again, and it is worth naming honestly, without pointing at any one shop, because it explains why this shot list matters. A meaningful share of the sites we looked at leaned on exactly two kinds of imagery: a photo of a bag of beans, and an embedded Instagram feed standing in for actual photography. Neither one shows a visitor what the room looks like, what the drinks look like made, or who is behind the counter.
That pattern is a symptom of something understandable, not a failure of effort. A bag of beans is easy to photograph, sitting still on a counter with good light. A room full of moving people and steam and afternoon sun is harder to capture well, and an Instagram feed already exists, so it gets embedded instead of a real photo gallery being built. But a visitor deciding whether to drive across town for coffee is trying to picture the actual place, and a bag of beans does not help them do that.
None of this is about any specific shop doing something wrong. It is about a pattern common enough across our own audit findings, from that Southeast wave, to be worth naming plainly, because it points directly at what a better set of photos should show instead.
The Shot List
Twelve shots cover almost everything a cafe site needs, and most shops can get all twelve in a single afternoon session. The room itself, wide, showing the actual seating and layout a visitor would walk into. The counter, from a customer's eye level, showing where you order. A barista at work, pulling a shot or steaming milk, showing a real person doing the actual craft. A finished drink, close, showing latte art or the drink as it is served, not staged with props that do not match reality.
The pastry case or food display, if you have one, showing what is available that day. The exterior and entrance, so someone can recognize the building and door from the street before they ever walk in. A detail shot of something specific to your shop, roasting equipment if you roast, a specific piece of art on the wall, whatever makes your place recognizably yours rather than interchangeable. A group of customers in the space, with permission, showing the room in use rather than empty.
Beyond those eight core shots, four more round out a fuller set: a close up of the drink menu or board, a wide shot from a different angle showing natural light at a different time of day, a photo of the register or ordering area from the customer's side, and a seasonal or rotating shot you can swap in and out as the actual offerings change through the year. Twelve shots, planned in advance, turn a single session into a genuinely complete photo set rather than a scattered handful of whatever happened to look good.
Sizes and Formats That Keep the Page Fast
Google's own image guidance is consistent on the core idea, whatever the specific numbers: use appropriately sized images for where they will display, compress them, and choose a format suited to the content, all in service of a page that loads quickly rather than one that makes a visitor wait. A hero image at the top of a homepage does not need to be the multi megabyte original your phone produced, it needs to look sharp at the size it is displayed, which is usually far smaller than the original file.
Most website platforms, Wix, Squarespace and Shopify among them, apply some automatic compression on upload, which helps, but starting with a properly sized original still matters, since automatic compression on an oversized original can still leave you with a heavier file than a properly resized one processed the same way. Each platform's help documentation states its own recommended dimensions for hero images, gallery images and thumbnails, and those recommended sizes are worth checking directly for your specific platform rather than assuming one size fits every slot on every site.
A quick way to see the actual effect of this is a before and after speed test on a single page, run through PageSpeed Insights on mobile, comparing a page using an oversized hero image against the same page using a properly resized one. The difference in loading time and total page weight between the two versions makes the case for proper sizing more clearly than any general recommendation can, since it is your own page and your own numbers.
Rights: What You Can and Cannot Use
This is not legal advice, and rights rules genuinely vary by country, so the general points here are a starting place, not a final answer, and an official source like the US Copyright Office's Copyright Basics guidance is the right place to go for anything more specific to your situation. Within the United States, a photo generally belongs, in a copyright sense, to whoever took it, not to whoever it is a photo of, which matters more than most cafe owners realize.
A photo your staff member took on a work phone during their shift is generally understood to belong to the business under normal employment circumstances, but a photo a customer took and posted, even a wonderful photo of your latte art, is not automatically yours to use on your website just because it shows your shop. Using a customer's photo commercially on your own site generally requires their clear permission, ideally documented somewhere, not just an assumption that posting publicly on social media grants that right.
A photographer you hire retains rights to their own work under most standard arrangements unless a specific agreement transfers or licenses those rights to you, so any photography session worth paying for should include a clear, written understanding of exactly what you are allowed to do with the resulting images, on your website, in print, in ads, before the session happens rather than being figured out after the fact.
Stock photography carries its own real risk for a cafe specifically, beyond the licensing question. A stock photo of a coffee shop interior that does not match your actual space sets an expectation a visitor will notice is false the moment they walk in, which damages trust in a way that is hard to repair with a single visit. Even where a stock photo is fully licensed and legally fine to use, it is still, for a cafe, usually the wrong choice.
Planning the Session
Budget an afternoon, roughly two to three hours including setup and a few retakes, for a full twelve shot session done in one pass. Morning light and afternoon light look different in most spaces, so pick the time of day that shows your room at its best, rather than whatever time happens to be convenient, if you have flexibility to choose.
Shoot more than you need. For each of the twelve shots on the list, take several versions from slightly different angles or moments, since it is far easier to pick the best of five similar shots afterward than to realize later that the one shot you took of something important came out blurry or oddly framed.
Get written or at least clearly documented permission from any customer appearing recognizably in a photo before using it on the site, and get the same understanding from staff about how their image will be used. This is a small step that protects both the shop and the people in the photos, and it costs almost nothing to handle properly at the time of the shoot rather than after the fact.
Where Each Photo Actually Belongs on the Page
A shot list is only half the job. Where each photo lives on the page matters almost as much as the photo itself, and this is the part shops most often get wrong even after taking good pictures. A photo of the room belongs near the top of the homepage or an about section, giving a visitor an immediate sense of the space before they read a word of copy. A photo of a barista at the espresso bar belongs near any text describing your coffee program, not floating in a disconnected gallery at the bottom of the page.
The pastry case photo belongs near your food or menu content, and the exterior shot belongs near your hours, location or contact section, since that is exactly where someone checking those details is already looking and benefits most from a visual confirmation of what the building looks like from the street. Placing a photo near the words it relates to is not just a design preference, it helps a visitor trust what they are reading, since the photo is doing the work of backing up the claim right where the claim is being made.
A gallery page, if your site has one, still has a place for the fuller set of photos, but even there, some structure helps more than a flat grid of unlabeled images. Grouping by category, the space, the drinks, the people, the food, gives a visitor a faster, clearer sense of what they are looking at than a single undifferentiated scroll of everything at once.
Exporting and Adding Alt Text
Once you have your favorites picked from the session, export each one at a size appropriate for where it will be used on the site, generally smaller than the original file straight off a camera or phone, following whatever size guidance your specific platform's help documentation recommends for that slot, hero, gallery or thumbnail.
Add alt text to each photo as you upload it, a plain, honest sentence describing what is in the image, the way you would describe it to someone who cannot see it. This step covers both accessibility, since a screen reader relies on this description, and gives search engines a way to understand what the image shows, since they cannot interpret pixels the way a person can. A separate post on this site covers alt text in more depth with worked examples if you want to go further into that specific piece.
This whole process, planning the shot list, running the session, resizing and describing each photo, is a project you can finish in a day or two, not a redesign, and it makes a real difference in how honestly your site represents the actual place a visitor is deciding whether to come find.
Related Reading
More from Hillcane on this topic, plus the pages on the site that sit next to the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What photos does a cafe website need?
A core set of about twelve shots covers most of what matters: the room, the counter, a barista at work, a finished drink close up, the pastry case if you have one, the exterior and entrance, a detail shot unique to your shop, and customers in the space with permission. Round it out with the menu board, a different angle showing different light, the ordering area, and a seasonal shot you can rotate.
Should a cafe use stock photos on its website?
Usually not, even when a stock photo is fully licensed. A stock interior that does not match your space sets an expectation a visitor sees is false the moment they walk in, and that dent in trust is hard to repair in one visit. Real photos do the job better and cost little: the twelve shot list in this post, from the room and counter to the entrance and a finished drink, fits into one afternoon session with a phone.
Can I use a customer's photo of my cafe on my website?
Generally only with the customer's clear permission, ideally documented. In the United States a photo usually belongs, in a copyright sense, to whoever took it, not to whoever or whatever is in it, so a great customer shot of your latte art posted on social media is not automatically yours to use commercially. The US Copyright Office's Copyright Basics guidance is a good starting point; this is general information, not legal advice, and rules vary by country.
Who owns the rights to photos a hired photographer takes?
Under most standard arrangements, the photographer keeps the rights to their own work unless a specific agreement transfers or licenses them to you. So agree in writing, before the session, exactly where you may use the images: your website, print, ads. The US Copyright Office's Copyright Basics guidance covers the general principle, though this is not legal advice. By contrast, photos a staff member takes on a work phone during a shift generally belong to the business under normal employment circumstances.
What image sizes keep a cafe website fast?
Size each image for the slot it fills and compress it, rather than uploading a multi megabyte original straight from a phone; that is the core of Google's image guidance. Wix, Squarespace and Shopify each publish recommended dimensions for hero, gallery and thumbnail slots, so check your platform's help documentation directly. To see the difference, run the same page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile with an oversized hero image and again with a properly resized one.
Do Wix, Squarespace and Shopify automatically resize uploaded photos?
Yes, Wix, Squarespace and Shopify all apply some automatic compression on upload, which helps. Starting from a properly sized original still matters, because compressing an oversized original can leave a heavier file than compressing one that was resized first. Each platform's help documentation lists recommended dimensions for hero, gallery and thumbnail images. A before and after test in PageSpeed Insights on mobile shows the effect on your own page better than any general rule.
What did your own audit findings show about typical cafe website photos?
Across a Southeast wave of our audit work, a meaningful share of sites relied on exactly two kinds of imagery, a photo of a bag of beans and an embedded Instagram feed, rather than real photography of the room, the drinks or the people. This pattern is common enough to be worth naming plainly as a reason a real shot list matters.
How long does a full photo session take?
Roughly two to three hours for all twelve shots in one pass, including setup and a few retakes. Choose the time of day when your room looks best, since morning and afternoon light differ, and take several versions of each shot so a blurry frame of something important does not leave a gap. Collect documented permission from any recognizable customer and a clear understanding with staff at the shoot, not afterward, then resize and add alt text as you upload.
Do I need to add alt text to every photo?
Yes, for any photo carrying real information, which is most of them. Alt text is a plain, honest sentence describing what is actually in the image, useful both for screen readers and for search engines that cannot interpret pixels directly. A separate post on this site covers alt text in more depth with worked examples.
How can Hillcane help plan a cafe's photo session and site setup?
Hillcane can build a shot list around your actual space from the twelve shots in this post, plan image sizes for your platform, whether Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, and decide where each photo sits on the page, such as the room near the top and the exterior beside your hours. It also covers permissions for customers and staff and a written understanding with any hired photographer before the session. Reach hillcane.co/contact or call (256) 384-2449.
Work with Hillcane
A bag of beans and an embedded Instagram feed are not photography. Here is the real shot list, sizing and rights guide a cafe site actually needs.
Want help planning your cafe's photo session and getting it right on your site? Reach Hillcane at hillcane.co/contact or call (256) 384-2449.
Comments