A shoot with a plan, then a page that stays fast
An owner deciding where to leave their dog or cat for a week wants to see the actual rooms, runs and people. Getting those pictures onto a pet business website in a way that reassures rather than frustrates is a small project: a shot list, a morning with a camera or a good phone, permissions, a set of image sizes, and a premises page built so the photos load quickly and can be added to every month. Here is the setup, start to finish.
Step 1: the shot list
Write it before the shoot, walking the route an animal takes. Every space the animal will be in, from the door to where it sleeps, each from an owner's eye height and once from the animal's height. Then the people.
- Daycare and boarding: entrance and reception, the assessment space, each play area with the group size visible, the outdoor area and fencing, sleeping quarters with bedding, the quiet room for a nervous dog, the kitchen where food is prepared, the collection point.
- Cattery: every pen type inside and out, the sleeping shelf, the outdoor run, the gap between pens, the heating, the cleaning routine mid-action.
- Grooming salon: the table, the bath, the drying area, where dogs wait between stages, a groom in progress, a finished dog beside its owner.
- Mobile groomer: the van outside a real house, the inside with water and power visible, a dog on the table.
- Vet: waiting room with the separate cat area if there is one, a consult room, the inpatient kennels, the dispensary counter.
- Walkers and sitters: the person with a client dog, the car with the crates, the fields, a sample visit report on a phone.
- Everyone: each team member at work, by name, and a group photo outside the building.
Tick the list off during the shoot. The one you skip is the one an owner phones to ask about.
Step 2: the shoot itself
Daylight, lights on, doors open, on a day the place is clean but working, so there are real animals in the frames. A photographer for a morning is the best value on the site; a recent phone in good light is the fallback. Wide shots for size, then details for cleanliness: bedding, bowls, floors. Nothing staged that is not true on a normal Tuesday.
Film the walk-through on the same morning: one continuous ninety-second phone clip following the animal's route, and a thirty-second groom from arrival to finish for a salon.
Step 3: permissions
Client animals in the photos need the owner's permission, and staff need to agree to appear. Add a photo permission to the consent forms in the booking platform (Gingr, MoeGo, PetExec and Time To Pet all carry custom agreements) so future photos are covered at first booking. For the shoot day, a one-line message to the owners of the dogs present. Keep a note of who said yes against each image.
Step 4: sizes, formats and naming
Photos straight from a camera are several megabytes each; forty of them on one page is why premises pages crawl. Before upload:
- Export at 1600 pixels on the long edge for gallery images, 2400 for the one hero image, and let the site generate the smaller sizes.
- Modern formats (WebP or AVIF) with a JPEG fallback, quality around 75 to 80.
- Descriptive file names and alt text in plain words: "cattery-pen-with-outdoor-run" rather than "IMG_4821".
- Lazy loading for everything below the first screen, with width and height set so the page does not jump.
- Video on YouTube or Vimeo, embedded with a poster image, so no player script loads until the owner taps play.
Step 5: photos as records
Each image is a record with fields: the image, a one-line caption ("Small-dog play area, up to eight dogs, morning session"), the area it shows, the service it relates to, the date, and the permission note. The premises page renders the records grouped by area; the daycare page pulls the daycare images; the home page picks four flagged as favourites. One upload, three pages.
Step 6: the premises page
One page, called The premises or Our place, linked from the header and every service page. At the top, the walk-through video with its poster. Then the photographs grouped by area in the order an animal experiences them, each with its caption. A short line under each group saying what happens there and how many animals share it. At the bottom, the team photo with a link to Our team, and the Book button.
Nothing else on the page: no reviews widget, no map, no chat bubble.
Step 7: spread the photos through the site
The rule: an owner never reads about a space without seeing it. The daycare page shows the play area, boarding shows the sleeping quarters, grooming shows the table and a finished dog, the first-visit page shows the reception they will walk into, the team page shows the people. Draw them all from the same records so a replaced photo updates everywhere.
Step 8: keep it current
One photo a month from the floor, captioned and dated, added as a record. The platform's report cards and daily photo updates, covered by the permission gathered at booking, are the easy source. Every January, remove anything that no longer matches the building.
Where this sits
Real premises photography, shot to a list, sized properly and built as records that feed a dedicated page and every service page, is one of the six must-haves in every pet business website we build. The owner is going to the building before they go to the building; the site should make that visit quick and honest.