Naming your photo files, and why it matters.

A picture arrives with nothing written on it.

Open any photograph on a computer and the machine holding it knows almost nothing about its contents. It knows the dimensions, the date and some camera settings. It does not know that this is you, that the picture is a headshot, or that the background is gray. All of that has to be supplied in words, by you, in a handful of small places.

There are only four of those places on an ordinary web page: the file name, the alt description, a caption if there is one, and the text sitting immediately around the image. That is the entire vocabulary available. A picture uploaded as a camera code with an empty alt attribute has supplied none of it, which is why it is invisible to anyone searching by name and to anyone using a screen reader.

None of this is trickery, and none of it requires an agency. It is simply the difference between labelling something and not labelling it.

How to name a file so it survives.

A good name is readable by a person and by a machine at the same time. The pattern that holds up over years runs from general to specific: who, what kind of picture, then whatever distinguishes this one from its neighbors.

• Lowercase throughout, with hyphens between words. Spaces become awkward codes in a web address and underscores read as a single run of characters to some systems.
• Describe the subject, not the equipment. A camera code identifies nothing. A name with your name in it is findable on your own computer for the rest of its life.
• Add the distinguishing detail: the backdrop, the outfit, the crop. Something like firstname-lastname-headshot-gray-square is instantly sortable.
• Keep versions explicit rather than hopeful. A trailing v2 is fine; a trailing final-final is a warning sign.
• Leave out dates unless the picture is genuinely dated material, in which case put the year at the end where it will not disturb the sort order.

The test is simple: if you saw the name in a list a year from now, with no picture beside it, would you know which photograph it was? If yes, the name is doing its job. Do this once for a set and every subsequent use becomes a search rather than a hunt.

Alt text describes the photograph, not the page.

The alt attribute exists first for people who cannot see the image, and it is read aloud in place of the picture. That single fact settles almost every question about how to write one. Describe what is actually in the frame, in a plain sentence, as though telling a friend on the phone what the picture shows.

A useful alt description for a portrait names the person and the essentials of the photograph: who it is, what kind of picture it is, and one or two visual details that matter. It does not need to open with image of or photo of, because the software already knows it is an image. It does not need to be long. It does need to be true.

Two failures are common and both come from the same misunderstanding. The first is stuffing the description with search terms, which reads terribly aloud and helps nobody. The second is describing the page rather than the picture, so a portrait ends up labelled with a business name and a location that appear nowhere in the frame. Describe the photograph. If a page is about something specific, the page text is where that belongs.

Purely decorative images, a divider or a background texture, should carry an empty alt attribute so a screen reader passes over them in silence. That is a genuine part of the standard rather than a shortcut.

Prepare the file before it goes up.

Uploading the largest version you own is the most common mistake here, and it is a costly one. Oversized images make a page slow to load for every visitor, and no browser rewards you for supplying pixels it will only throw away.

• Resize a copy to about twice the width of the space it will occupy on the page, which covers dense displays and stops there.
• Export in sRGB so the color behaves the same on every machine that opens it.
• Save as a JPEG at a good but not maximum quality setting; the last increments of quality add weight you cannot see.
• Give the resized copy its own descriptive name rather than a serial number added by the export.

How much resolution any given use actually needs is worth knowing properly rather than guessing at, and how much resolution a use needs walks through the arithmetic for screens and prints alike. The short version for a website is that the space the picture sits in decides everything, and the picture should be built to fit it.

One master set, and disposable copies.

The habit worth building is a single folder that holds the delivered pictures, untouched, and a working folder where every resized, cropped and renamed copy lives. Publish from the working folder. Never edit the masters, and never let a copy pulled back off a website become your only version, because that file has already been resized and compressed for the web and cannot be restored.

Name the folders the way you name the files, so the whole thing sorts sensibly: the year and the kind of session is usually enough. Where those folders live, how many places they exist in and what happens when a computer dies is its own subject, taken up in archiving your photos.

Do this and the awkward request stops being awkward. When somebody asks for a high resolution portrait for a printed program, you have one, it is named after you, and you can find it in a few seconds instead of forwarding whatever turns up in an old email.

The versions worth keeping on hand.

Most people need the same small set, and having them ready removes the scramble every time a request arrives.

• A square crop for profiles, since almost every profile picture is displayed as a square or a circle.
• A wide crop for headers, banners and slides, where the shape is much wider than a camera frame.
• An upright, full quality version for anything printed, kept at its original size.
• A black and white version if you use one, named so it cannot be confused with the color original.

All of those come out of the same session, which is why it helps to say at planning time where the pictures are going. How many looks and crops a session is built to produce is one of the things that moves the number, as what drives the cost of a session explains, and shapes are worth thinking about early because trimming a frame to a new proportion always spends something, which print sizes and cropping covers in full.

Where each of these versions belongs, from a profile to a speaker page to a press mention, is laid out in where to use your new headshot everywhere. If the pictures are carrying a business rather than a person, a personal brand session produces a library rather than a single frame, and website and brand imagery is where that library usually lands first. For the wider ground underneath all of it, the complete guide to professional headshots is the map.