The practical version
Everyone agrees a cattery site needs photographs of the pens. The part that goes wrong is the setup: forty full-size images dumped into one gallery, a page that takes six seconds on rural mobile data, no captions, no way to get from a photograph to a booking, and file names like IMG_4821.
This is the how-to. Shooting day, then processing, then how it goes on the site.
Before the camera comes out, decide the pen types
Photography is organised by pen type, not by day. Write your list first: standard single, deluxe, family pen for two or three cats from one home, quiet pen, isolation. Each type is going to become a section or page of its own with its own price, its own captions and its own booking link, so the shoot is a set per type rather than a wander around the block.
Shooting day
Daylight, mid-morning or mid-afternoon, and never with the overhead strip lights doing the work on their own. Clean pens, fresh bedding, nothing stacked in the corridor.
Phone cameras are fine now. Hold it at cat height for interiors and at adult height for the block. Do not use flash into mesh. Take more frames than you need of the sleeping area and the run, because those two are the ones owners study.
For each type: the sleeping area with bedding, the unit from outside with something for scale, the run showing height and shelves, the view from where the cat sits, the heat source, the gap to the next pen, and the block or corridor. Then, once for the whole cattery: the food preparation area, the medication storage, the laundry, the isolation pen and the grounds.
Add a ninety-second walk-through video, filmed slowly, no music or something very quiet.
Permissions
If a resident cat is in shot, you need the owner's agreement. Put a simple opt-in on the booking form, store it against the booking, and keep a list of which cats are cleared. Never publish someone's cat because the photograph came out well. Staff in shot need to agree too, and if a member of staff leaves and asks, take them down.
Processing, in one pass
- Crop to consistent shapes: one landscape ratio for the wide shots, one for the details. Mixed ratios make a gallery look untidy no matter how good the photographs are.
- Resize so the longest edge is around 1600 pixels for a full-width image and 1000 for a grid tile. Nothing straight off a camera goes on a website.
- Export as WebP or AVIF with a JPEG fallback, and let the site serve several widths so a phone downloads a phone-sized file.
- Name files in plain words: cattery-family-pen-outdoor-run.webp, not IMG_4821.
- Write alt text that describes the space, not the mood: "Family pen with a heated sleeping area and a full-height outdoor run".
- Aim for well under 200KB per image after processing.
How it goes on the site
One block per pen type. Photographs, a plain description, the nightly price, the multi-cat rate and a booking button that arrives at your software with that pen type already selected. This is the whole point of organising by type: the photograph and the booking are the same journey.
Captions under every image. One line, with the numbers in it. Size, temperature, how many cats, how far to the next pen.
Lazy loading below the first screen. The first image on the page loads eagerly, everything else loads as the owner scrolls. Set width and height on every image so the page does not jump about while it loads.
The video behind a poster image. Host it on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it so the player only loads when someone taps. A video file served from your own page is the most common reason a cattery site is slow.
Held as records, not hard-coded. Each pen type as a record with its images, caption, price and booking link, so when you extend the block or repaint you replace the photographs yourself rather than raising a ticket.
Check the result on a phone
Outside, on mobile data, cold. The page should arrive in under two seconds and the first pen photograph should be visible almost immediately. Scroll the gallery and watch for layout jumping. Then tap through from a pen photograph to booking and count the taps. Two is good, four means the structure is wrong.
Keep it honest and keep it current
Photograph what exists, not what you are about to build, and reshoot a pen type each season so the site never shows a block you repainted two years ago. An owner who arrives to something different from the pictures has been mildly misled, and in this trade reassurance is the entire product.
Stock photography of cats has no place on the page at all. Any owner comparing three catteries can tell, and it quietly undoes everything the real photographs were doing.
Where this sits
Pen types as photographed, priced, bookable records, with the shot list, image processing and the walk-through video, are how we build a cat boarding website with online booking, and the same premises photography approach runs through our pet business websites. Packages are on pricing. Half a day with a phone camera and a clean block is the highest-return work a cattery can do on its site.