The photography portfolios that get people hired share three things: around twenty images rather than a hundred, one clear genre rather than everything the photographer can shoot, and a visible route to enquire on every screen.
Almost every portfolio I am asked to fix breaks at least two of those. The work is usually excellent. The presentation is doing the opposite of what the photographer wants.
How many images should a photography portfolio have?
Around twenty across the whole site. Thirty at the absolute outside.
This is the hardest advice to accept and the one that most improves results. A hundred images does not read as a larger body of work. It reads as an inability to choose, which is precisely the opposite of what someone is hiring you for.
Two rules make the cut easier:
Cut anything that is only there because it was hard to get. The client does not know it was hard. They only see whether they like it.
Cut anything that does not look like the work you want more of. Your portfolio is a job advert. Whatever is in it is what you will be asked to shoot. Photographers who want to move from events to editorial keep event work in the portfolio and then wonder why the enquiries do not change.
If you cannot get below twenty, ask a photographer you respect to pick their favourite fifteen and use those. Outside judgement beats attachment every time.
What separates a good portfolio from a good gallery?
A gallery shows work. A portfolio gets someone hired. The differences are structural.
| Gallery | Portfolio |
|---|---|
| Everything worth showing | The tightest twenty |
| Mixed genres | One genre, clearly |
| Images speak for themselves | Context: where, who, what it was for |
| Contact somewhere | Contact visible on every screen |
| Ordered by date | Ordered by strength, best first |
The last row matters more than it sounds. Most visitors see the first three to five images and decide. Putting your strongest work first is not a trick, it is respecting how people actually look.
What do the strongest examples do?
Studying the portfolios that consistently convert, four patterns repeat.
They lead with one unmistakable image. Not a slideshow of eight. One photograph that establishes the standard and the style within a second of the page loading.
They name the genre immediately. “Wedding photography in Denver and across Colorado” appears above the fold, in text, not implied by the images. This is also the single biggest SEO miss on photography sites: pages of beautiful images with no text telling Google what they are.
They separate genres into pages. A photographer shooting weddings, portraits and brand work has three pages, not one gallery with three sections. Each ranks for what it is about, and each visitor sees only work relevant to them.
They show one real photograph of the photographer. People are hiring a person to spend a day with them. An About page with no face is a missed opportunity that costs bookings.
Do portfolio images hurt your site speed?
They are almost always the reason a photography site is slow. Not the platform.
Concrete numbers that work:
| Setting | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Long edge | 2,000 px | Enough for full-bleed on most screens |
| Hero images | 2,500 px | Headroom on large displays |
| Format and quality | JPEG, 70 to 80 | Visually indistinguishable from higher |
| Colour space | sRGB | Adobe RGB renders dull in browsers |
| File size | Under 300 KB | The practical ceiling |
Files left in Adobe RGB or ProPhoto look flat and slightly wrong in browsers, which is a mystifying problem to debug and a one-click fix at export.
Most photographers upload 4,000-pixel, 2 MB files straight out of Lightroom, which is how a homepage reaches 15 MB. A 15 MB homepage on the fastest host in the world is still a 15 MB homepage, and the visitor on a phone at a venue has already left. More on this in SEO for photographer portfolio websites.
Should client galleries live in your portfolio?
No. Keep delivery separate.
Pic-Time, Pixieset and similar platforms exist because delivery is a different product from marketing: it needs downloads, print ordering, expiry dates, passwords and album proofing. A website builder does none of that well.
Hosting delivery galleries on your own site gets you enormous page weight, no print fulfilment, and a client experience worse than the dedicated apps your clients have already used with other photographers.
Your website wins the booking. Your gallery platform delivers the work. They link to each other and do nothing else.
What platform do the best photography portfolios use?
Mostly Showit and Squarespace, for different reasons.
Showit gives total layout freedom and a separate mobile canvas you control per page. Photographers choose it because template sites in this industry start to look alike, and looking like six other photographers in your city is a genuine commercial problem when your product is your eye. Its blog runs on WordPress on the paid blog tiers, which means real SEO tooling. The honest cost is that the separate mobile canvas is twice the layout work on every page you ever add.
Squarespace is the answer if you would rather never think about the website again. Strong templates, every SEO field available, and nothing to maintain.
Neither ranks better because of the platform. The platform-specific mechanics are covered in Showit SEO for photographers.
How do you make a portfolio findable?
Text. Portfolios fail in search because they are almost entirely images.
Four fixes, in order of impact:
- Name the genre and location in the page title. “Wedding Photographer Denver” beats “Portfolio”.
- Put real text above the fold. Two sentences saying who you serve and where.
- Write descriptive alt text on every image, naming the venue and city where you know them. Google covers this in its image SEO best practices. This is free local relevance most photography sites discard.
- Blog the venues you shoot at. “Botanic Gardens wedding photographer” has almost no competition and the searcher has already booked the venue.
The keyword side of this is covered in SEO keywords for photographers.
Frequently asked questions
Around twenty across the whole site, and no more than thirty. If you split into galleries, keep each tight rather than padding all of them to the same length.
A complete narrative rather than only the highlights: preparation, ceremony, portraits, details and reception. Couples want to see you can cover a whole day, not just produce five spectacular frames.
Only on separate pages. Mixing genres in one gallery makes every visitor scroll past work that is irrelevant to them, and it prevents any page from ranking clearly.
Twice a year is plenty for most photographers, and updating means replacing rather than adding. If it has grown past thirty images, the update is a cut.
Yes, for search rather than social. Nobody finds you on Instagram by searching a venue name or a city and a shoot type. A website with venue and location content gets found by people who do not know you exist.
Too many images, mixed genres on one page, no text explaining what you do, slow loading, and no obvious way to get in touch. Rarely the photography itself.
The short version
Twenty images, one genre per page, strongest work first. Say what you shoot and where in text, not just in pictures. Export at 2,000 pixels and under 300 KB in sRGB. Keep delivery galleries on a delivery platform.
Then make it findable: genre and city in the title, real alt text on every image, and a venue post every time you shoot somewhere named.
Want a portfolio that gets found? I build and maintain photography websites for clients across the US, UK and Australia. See how I work as a Showit website designer.
