How to Select Good Stock Photos

I wanted to share some tips on how to curate great stock photos, specifically for a tourism website or travel brand. As someone who formerly designed websites for tourism companies, I know the importance of having great photos on your website. Photos are one of the first things people connect with, especially when it comes to travel or activity-related businesses. This makes having professional and engaging photos essential for creating a website that will convert in the travel industry.

Now, as I’m sure you probably know already, there are a ton of great resources out there for free high-quality images. Unsplash and Pexels are my favorite free options. However, knowing how to use these resources to enhance your website requires more than just finding nice-looking photos. So, today I’ll be walking through some tips and tricks for selecting coherent, professional photos, as well as going over my process for this. Let’s jump right in.

Creating Coherence with Your Photos

When it comes to selecting stock photos for your travel and tourism website, one of the most important considerations is coherence. Your website’s photos should tell a story and feel like they belong together. A mismatched collection of images, no matter how individually appealing, can make your tourism website appear disorganized, clunky or unprofessional.

So, how can you create a sense of coherence in your website or brand?

• Color Scheme: Pay attention to the colors within your chosen images. Try to select photos that have a similar color palette, or that match your website’s brand colors. This will help tie everything together and make your website feel professionally curated.
• Mood and Style: Choose images that share a similar tone or style. If your brand has a minimalist, clean vibe, opt for images with simple compositions. For a more adventurous, energetic feel, choose photos with vibrant colors and dynamic scenes.
• Photos Look Real: A lot of stock photos look fake and if the photos on your website look fake what does that communicate to the user? Keep an eye out for cheesy smiles, or unrealistic situations or overly intense rays of light (stock photos love to use this style for some reason). Using photos like these are a dead give away that they're stock photos and have the potential to hurt your credibility. Here’s a couple of examples to give you an idea of what to avoid.

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Step 1: Collecting Your Photos for your website

The first step to selecting great stock photos is to collect a variety of options. Platforms like Unsplash and Pexels make this process easier by providing tools that allow you to create collections of images. 

Here are the basic steps to follow when you start collecting photos:

• Use Collections or Boards: As I already mentioned, most stock image platforms often have a collection or board functionality. As you scroll through potential photos, simply add them to a collection. At this stage, don’t worry too much about refining—just gather a wide array of images that might work for your vision.
• Start by Entering in Keywords Around Your Topic: When you start searching you can start with broad keywords and move to more specific ones. For our example, I started with the keyword “Peru”. From here you can start narrowing down your search options in a couple of ways. With my topic being travel excursions in Peru I can also search cities and areas in the country. One obvious one that comes up is “Machu Pichu”. I could also search “Peruvian People” which will bring up a lot of people dressed in traditional Peruvian clothing. If needed, you can also brainstorm a list of keywords before you start searching for your images.
• Aim to Collect a Variation of People, Places, and Things: When building these collections you will want to collect a variation of the types of photos. For a travel brand, it’s great to have pictures of the locations that people might travel to, but it’s also great to have images of people enjoying and having fun in different locations. Food is another thing that might be good to include for a travel brand. So aim to get a variation of people, places, and things around your topic when you collect your initial photos.
• Collect Both Landscape and Portrait Orientations: Having photographs with different orientations will help when you start using them on your website or other applications. A landscape-style image will be great for a hero section on your website but you may need something that’s more portrait-oriented to use in the body section.
• Stay Open to Possibilities: It’s important to stay flexible at this point. Even if a photo doesn’t seem like an exact fit, it might offer something you can work with, whether that’s color, composition, or mood. Flexibility is key in the early stages.

Step 2: Refining Your Collection for Travel Site Design

Once you’ve built up a solid collection of potential photos, it’s time to start refining. This step is all about narrowing down your selection to create a coherent, cohesive visual narrative for your travel agency website.

• Compare and Contrast: Look at the images side by side. Which ones work together? Which ones feel out of place? This is where you start eliminating images that don’t match the overall vibe or tone you’re going for with your website.
• Focus on Details: Pay attention to subtle elements such as lighting, contrast, and composition. Are the photos too bright or too dark compared to each other? Are they taken from vastly different angles that make them seem disjointed when viewed as a group? For example, the best travel website designs focus on consistency, helping to make a destination look enticing and coherent across the entire site.

Step 3: Aligning Photos with Editing Tools for Travel Web Design

Once you’ve narrowed down your selection, the final step I like to do is download all the photos I like and place them in a photo editing software to get a bird’s-eye view of all the images. This is where you ensure that the photos you’ve chosen are not only cohesive but also aligned in terms of color, tone, and style.

• Use Tools for a Visual Overview: Upload your refined selection into photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Canva. These tools allow you to view your images side by side, giving you a clearer sense of how they look together. I generally use Figma for this step but pretty much any photo editing software will work so just use what you’re most comfortable with.
• Remove Any Photos that Don’t Work: Once you have a birds-eye view of all your photos remove those that don’t match or that maybe stand out from the others and don’t look cohesive.
• Make Adjustments for Consistency: If some images need slight adjustments to match your color palette or style, this is the time to do it. You might need to tweak the brightness, saturation, or contrast to ensure that everything feels visually unified.
• Export and Save: Once you’ve narrowed down your photos and are happy with the results you can export these to a file of your choice and make them available for use on your website or any other place you need some consistent imagery.
• Continue to Itterate and Make Adjustments: This might seem like an odd last step but keep in mind this process is pretty fluid and you may need to find additional photos for your website or brand down the road. Once you have an idea of the style you’re going for you can continue to look for additional photos and add as you see fit. Just keep in mind the tips and tricks to make sure they continue to keep them all consistent and aligned.

Final Thoughts

Once you’ve gathered a selection of cohesive photos, it’s time to think about professionalism. A professional-looking website is not only about high-quality images but also about their arrangement and consistency. Here are a few tips:

• Consistency: Avoid switching between different types of imagery. Stick to one style when possible and stay consistent throughout your website. This may evolve over time but for the most part this should be subtle.
• Focus on Quality: Always ensure that the resolution of your chosen stock photos is high enough. Low-resolution images can appear pixelated, which can degrade the quality of your site, hindering the ability of your website to come off as professional.

Conclusion

Here are the final photos I went with for the travel agency website. With the right resources and a little bit of strategy, you can create a visually stunning website that not only looks great but also feels unified and professional. Ultimately this can only help your website convert better. Take the time to collect a wide range of photos, refine your collection thoughtfully, and use editing tools to make sure everything is aligned. In the end, your website will be better for it.