The Restaurant Photo Spec Sheet

Every restaurant ends up needing the same dozen image sizes, but almost no one shoots them at once. The result: a Google Business Profile cover that's the wrong aspect ratio and got cropped weirdly, a Yelp photo that's portrait when Yelp wants landscape, a menu page where every dish photo is a different shape and the layout breaks.

This is the spec sheet I send every studio client and every photographer I work with. One shoot, the right specs in advance, and the result drops cleanly into every surface.

The 10 image sizes you actually need

Resolution rules

Always shoot at the resolution recommended above PLUS roughly 30% extra. You can always crop down; you can never crop up. A hero shot at 2400×1024 lets you also produce the 1200×630 OG card from the same file; a hero shot at 1200×630 leaves you stuck.

For images that ship to your site, export as CDN-friendly WebP at 80% quality — it's typically 60-70% smaller than JPG without visible loss.

Alt text — the most-skipped part of the spec sheet

Every image needs alt text. Not "IMG_4521.jpg," not the menu name, not "delicious food." A specific descriptive sentence: "Plate of carnitas with cilantro, white onion, and lime on a wood board." Costs 5 seconds per photo and earns you SEO + accessibility + AI-search citation.

For a 30-photo restaurant shoot, that's 150 seconds — or two minutes — of writing. Skip it and you've left every photo's SEO value on the floor.

Alt text is the part of the spec sheet nobody reads. It's also the part Google reads first.

The shot list to hand a photographer

Run Photo Brief. It generates a per-surface shot list with the spec sheet attached — exactly the document you'd hand a photographer the morning of the shoot. Save the brief to your Workshop so you can re-run it for the next seasonal shoot.

The shoot itself is usually 2-3 hours for a 30-photo deliverable: the hero, 10-15 dishes, 4-6 room shots, 2-3 detail shots (a hand pouring wine, smoke off a grill, the chef plating). Done in one go, you have material for every surface for the next 12 months.

The 6-second pre-publish gut check

Before any photo lands on the site, run it through this check. Six questions, one click each, takes about as long as it sounds. If you can't answer "yes" to all six, the photo isn't ready — not because the photo is bad, but because something around the photo is.

The "shoot it yourself with a phone" version

If hiring a photographer isn't in budget, the phone version still works. Modern phones in good light routinely beat low-effort DSLR work — the variable that matters most isn't the sensor, it's the time of day and the angle to the window. Three rules:

1. Daylight only. Shoot 11 AM to 2 PM near a window. Restaurant overhead lighting reads orange and dingy on the phone sensor.
2. One angle per dish, repeated. Pick top-down OR 3/4 front, and use the same angle for every dish so the menu page reads as one set.
3. Edit lightly. Increase exposure +0.3, boost shadows. Skip filters.

How often to re-shoot

Twice a year. Once before peak season (Memorial Day for summer, mid-October for the holidays); once when the menu changes substantially. If you re-shoot less than once a year, the photos start looking dated to regulars even if they're still technically accurate.

Save the dates in your Workshop alongside your Margin Math and Restaurant Audit scenarios. The compounding argument: photo cadence is one of the few maintenance loops that visibly affects average review rating, because the GBP cover and the menu thumbnails set the expectation guests bring through the door — and reviews are written against that expectation, not against the food alone.

Bad photos don't just fail to help. They actively drag the average down by setting the wrong expectation before anyone walks in the door.