What we are building
Not a gallery. A small, repeatable production line that gives you one set of van photographs you will use for two years, plus a before and after routine you can run on a normal working day without adding ten minutes to every dog.
Most mobile groomers know they need photographs. What they do not have is a method that survives a busy week, which is why the site still shows two pictures from the day the van was wrapped.
Step 1: book one shoot morning and prepare the van for it
Half a day, no dogs, ideally overcast bright rather than hard sun. Clean the van properly first, including the parts you have stopped seeing: the bath, the drain, the floor edges, the inside of the doors.
Park somewhere plain and residential. A quiet street with ordinary houses beats a car park, because the exterior shot is meant to show an owner what will sit outside their home. Open the back doors so daylight fills the interior; a grooming van shot with the doors shut is a dark box.
Step 2: shoot the fixed set
A modern phone is fine. Hold it level, shoot in landscape for the site and grab a portrait version of the best three for social.
The fixed set is the interior wide from the back doors, the bath empty, the table with the restraint visible, the dryer, the water tank or hookup, the power set-up, the floor and drainage, the exterior clean on a normal street, and you standing beside the open doors with your face visible.
Shoot each one three or four times and move a step between attempts. You are not being artistic; you are giving yourself a choice later.
Step 3: build a before and after station you can hit every time
This is where most groomers fail, because the before shot happens in a hallway and the after shot happens in the van, so the pair looks like two different dogs in two different worlds.
Pick one spot inside the van, mark where the dog stands with a piece of tape on the table, and mark where you stand. Same spot, same distance, same height, every dog. Take the before as the dog goes on the table and the after before it comes off. It costs about fifteen seconds a dog once it is a habit.
The pairs that come out of that station are worth more than any styled photograph, because the only thing that changes between the two frames is your work.
Step 4: get permission and record it
Add a consent line to your intake questions in MoeGo, Savvy Pet Spa, Fresha or Booksy: a tick box covering photographs of the dog on your website and social accounts, with the answer stored on the client record. Then you never have to chase anyone afterwards, and you can tell at a glance which pairs you may publish.
Frame every shot so no house number, front door, street sign or number plate identifies where a client lives. A van parked in front of a recognisable address is a photograph you should not publish.
Step 5: shoot a ninety second walkthrough while the van is clean
One take, handheld, phone in landscape, walking from the back doors through the van and talking about what happens to a dog from arrival to handover. No script, no music. It answers the safety question, the noise question and the who are you question at once, and you will never have a better day to film it than the day you cleaned everything.
Step 6: process the files before they go near the site
Photographs are the main reason grooming sites are slow, and slow matters more for you than for a salon because your visitors are on phones and moving.
Export at a sensible width rather than straight from the camera roll, serve modern formats, compress, and let the site generate the smaller sizes for smaller screens. The hero image loads first, everything below it loads lazily. No carousels or sliders, which cost weight and hide the pictures anyway. The target is the page appearing in under two seconds on a phone on ordinary mobile data.
Write real alt text on each one, describing what is in the frame. It is an accessibility requirement and it is free context for search.
Step 7: place them, one shot per job
Give each photograph a job rather than a slot in a gallery. The interior wide shot and the table shot go near the top of the home page, above the price table. Two or three go on every area page, because that is often the first page a stranger sees. Your face goes beside the main Book button. The requirements page gets the water and power shots, which turn an instruction into a demonstration. Service pages get before and after pairs from that fixed station.
Step 8: set a refresh rhythm
Once a quarter, pick the best six new pairs, replace the oldest six, and reshoot the van interior if you have changed anything in it. Ten minutes. Photographs of a van that no longer looks like your van are worse than none.
Where this sits
The shoot morning, the before and after station, the consent field and the image pipeline behind them are part of a mobile grooming website as we build it, and real photography rather than stock runs through all our pet business websites. What each package covers is on pricing. Clean the van once, and get two years out of the morning.