A photo refresh is not a new shoot. It's an editorial pass: which ones earn their spot, which ones lie to the diner, which ones quietly belong in the archive.
What you'll be able to do by the end
- Audit your current restaurant photos against 4 honesty criteria.
- Categorize each existing photo as keep / replace / retire.
- Produce a short shot list for the replacements (3-5 new photos max).
Plain language version — the fast read
Look at every photo on your current site. Put each one in a bucket: keep, replace, or remove. Three to five replacements is enough. Write a short brief for each replacement. Old photos are not loyal — bad photos lose diners.
The three-bucket triage
Every photo on your existing site (and your Google Business Profile, and your Instagram grid) goes into one of three buckets. Read the rules below before you open your site to triage — knowing the categories first makes the triage twenty times faster.
Triage your current photos by category
The three-bucket model above is the lens — apply it to each photo on your site mentally as you scroll through. The widget below is the action half: which category needs your next shoot first. Open your current site in another tab, walk through the photo categories below, and rank by which most needs refresh.
The top three turn red — those are the categories you photograph next month, in order. The bottom categories can wait.
Notes on your top three categories
For each of your three red categories, write what specifically is wrong with the current photo and what the replacement needs to show. The specificity here is what gets the next shoot done — vague briefs produce vague photos.
If you ranked "Hero dish" or "Room" in the top three of your Lesson 5b audit ("photos look bad"), this is the lesson that names what to fix. Lesson 6b asked you to name the cause behind the symptom. If the cause was "we never hired a photographer," the answer is now booking one — your notes above are the brief. If the cause was "we did, in 2020, and the shoot lives on a hard drive we can't find," that's a different fix (re-shoot rather than chase old files).
The process answer — so this doesn't repeat in 18 months
L6b asked you to name causes; this section asks you to name an owner. The two together prevent the next 18-month repeat — symptom (stale photos) named in L5b, cause (no one assigned) named in L6b, owner (a specific person on a specific cadence) named here.
The reason your photos are outdated is not that you forgot to look at them. It's that nobody owns photo refresh as a recurring task. Most restaurants slot it in as a yearly checkup; that's enough for a rebuild track. Some put it on the quarterly close calendar with menu price reviews; better.
Pick one person, name a frequency, write it down. The L16 (30-day rhythm) lesson will fold this into a recurring calendar you can export — but the decision belongs here, while you're already thinking about photos.
While you're triaging — audit the alt text
Every "keep" photo gets transferred to the new site. Take 30 seconds per photo to also audit its alt text — the text screen readers read aloud to blind diners. On most existing restaurant sites it's either missing entirely, set to the file name ("IMG_4527.jpg"), or generic ("food image"). All three are functionally invisible to about 1 in 25 US adults.
For each "keep" photo, write a one-sentence description of the food — not the photo. "Roasted chicken with crispy skin on a bed of fingerling potatoes" — yes. "A close-up of our chicken dish" — no. Under 125 characters. The L14 generator will stamp these as the <img alt=""> attribute on every photo slot. This is the rebuild's chance to fix alt text the original site never had — without it, diners with visual impairments get an empty experience of your food.
What this changes downstream
The L14 generator reserves photo slots on the home page and menu page. Your "keep" photos load into them; your "refresh first" slots show a tasteful "Photo refresh in progress" placeholder; your "kill" photos disappear without a trace. Diners who land on the new site see honesty, not gaps.
Next is Lesson 10 — operational, drier work after this editorial weight. Setting hours and confirming your phone number. You earned the breather.
You sorted before you shot.
A ranked list of which photo categories most need refresh on your current site, your top three turned red, and specific notes on what the replacement needs to show — saved in your browser. The shoot list is now the rebuild's photo plan.
Refreshing what already works is the rebuilder's discipline; replacing what doesn't is the rebuilder's job. You did both.