You don't need a hundred photos. You need five strong ones in the right places. Diners decide on the second photo, not the tenth.
What you'll be able to do by the end
- Pick 8 shot types from a curated visual reference grid (3 of which become the home-page set).
- Write a 1-2 sentence brief for each shot — dish, light, angle, who's in frame.
- Decide whether to hire ($400-800) or DIY based on time + budget + portfolio fit.
Plain language version — the fast read
Look at the grid of photo types. Click eight of them. The first three are the most important — they go on the home page. For each, write one or two sentences: which dish? What light? Who's in the photo? Then decide: hire a photographer or shoot yourself.
The eight shot types
Restaurant photos cluster into five families — food, room, people, exterior, ingredient. Within those families, eight specific shots cover what a home page needs. Below is the order most operators rank them in; rerank them for your restaurant. A counter-service spot leads with food, a wine bar leads with the room, a family spot leads with people. Your top three become the home-page set; the other five live deeper on the site or wait for a second shoot.
Click cards to add them to your shot list. The first three you pick become the home-page set — pay attention to selection order. If you picked a cuisine in Lesson 4, you'll see two extra cards specific to that cuisine below the universal eight. If you put "chef portrait" in the top three and you're a counter spot, that's a signal to rethink. The chef portrait works when the chef is the brand; it's filler for everyone else.
What "good" looks like vs what "stock-photo bad" looks like
Compare these two descriptions of the same imaginary shot. Click through to see the difference between what a photographer with a brief shoots and what a tired phone-photo session produces.
The difference is mostly service-time honesty. A dinner-service photo says "this is what you get." A studio photo says "this is what we built for marketing." Diners can tell.
Notes on your top three shots
For each of the three shots you ranked highest, write a one-sentence note: which specific dish, which spot in the room, which time of day, which staff member. The more specific, the less back-and-forth with whoever's holding the camera.
Hire someone, or shoot yourself
Hiring a photographer for an afternoon costs $400–800 in most US cities for restaurant work and is usually worth it. They bring the right lens (something fast, like a 35mm or 50mm prime) and the discipline to come back if a shot didn't land. If you're going to hire, the brief above is what you hand them — they'll handle execution but they need your specificity.
If you're shooting yourself: do it at the time of day each shot is meant to read at, use the actual light of the room (don't add lamps), shoot more than you think — 30 frames of the same shot beats 5 frames of "I think this one is fine." Phone photos can be good; phone photos taken in the wrong light cannot.
Don't shoot until your menu shortlist is locked. Photographers shoot what you're going to serve. If you change your menu after the shoot, those photos become misleading. Lesson 8 happened first on purpose.
Write the alt text now, while the shot is fresh
Every photo on your site needs alt text — a one-sentence description of what's in the photo, read aloud to blind diners by screen readers and shown to sighted diners when the image fails to load. The L14 generator stamps a <img alt=""> attribute on every photo slot; you fill it now while the shot is in front of you, not three months later when you've forgotten what was on the plate.
Two rules:
- Describe the food, not the photo. "Roasted chicken with crispy skin on a bed of fingerling potatoes" — yes. "A beautiful close-up shot of our signature dish" — no. The screen-reader user wants to know what they would eat; they don't need the meta-commentary.
- Keep it under 125 characters. Long alt text gets cut off by some screen readers. If your dish has 4 ingredients you want named, name the 2 most distinctive.
This is not optional. About 1 in 25 US adults is blind or has significant vision impairment; about 25% of US adults have some form of disability. Your alt text is the experience they get of your food photos. A site without alt text isn't broken for them — it's just empty.
What this changes downstream
The L14 generator reserves slots in the home page and menu page for your top three photos. The brief you wrote above lives in your context so you (or your photographer) can reopen it any time — bookmark this lesson if that's likely.
If you're not going to shoot before launching the site, the generator handles it: empty photo slots show a tasteful "Photo coming" placeholder rather than breaking the layout. Diners read "we're still setting up" rather than "this site is broken."
You have a brief, not just a vague wish.
A ranked shot list of eight types plus specific notes on your top three — saved in your browser. The generator reads the brief and reserves photo slots; the brief travels with you to whoever's shooting.
The difference between a restaurant site with five strong photos and one with twenty weak photos is roughly the difference between feeling open and feeling abandoned.