Wisdom of posting links to Google Photos albums on website?

[Clay Carson]

Are there security or SEO concerns about linking to Photos albums? Or do you prefer a gallery plugin that keeps people on site instead? Our Photos albums are pretty robust, but I'm not crazy about the gallery plugin options we've tried so far. These are all 'before and after' type pictures, which not all gallery software displays correctly. (For example, showing in random order defeats the whole purpose...)

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hi @Clay Carson, by not having your photos on the website you'd be missing out on some potentially strong SEO opportunity that you simply can't get from adding photos to your GBP. It sounds like the website may be related to construction, restoration, or medical? In our experience one the most visited pages for a business that has "before and after" images will be the photo gallery. Because of this, you really want that page to be well optimized and simply look great to showcase the photos. From a direct SEO benefit, the website photos can impact your organic SEO by proper alt-text use and also proper naming of your photos when uploading to the website. I'd suggest the following articles:

Do Images Impact Ranking on Google? [Case Study] - Sterling Sky Inc

We have been doing a lot of testing around images in the last year at Sterling Sky. You can read about the tests we did on geotagging photos and the cover photo you select in Google My Business. For this test, we wanted to measure how the photos you use on your website impact your…

www.sterlingsky.ca

Does Adding Photos in Google My Business Increase Ranking? [Case Study] - Sterling Sky Inc

I often see posts come up in Facebook groups that recommend adding photos constantly to your Google My Business listing because this helps a business rank higher in the local pack results. Most people say it’s because Google likes “fresh” or “recent” content. TLDR; According to this case study...

www.sterlingsky.ca

8 Ways To Supercharge Your Alt Text SEO Strategy

Boost your SEO with strategic alt text. Learn how to optimize your images, save time, and improve your ranking potential with an AI SEO tool.

www.searchenginejournal.com

In regards to sorting of your images, are you using Wordress and if so, what is your theme? You may be able to sort the photos by strategic naming of your photos.

 

[Clay Carson]

Jeff, thanks for the info. Yes, we are using Wordpress and it does allow some in post galleries. But we have hundreds of photos so I'm looking for a solution that allows someone to browse through dozens of pictures in high res, without clogging up one single post too much. The media library of wp does a decent job, but I've seen much more comprehensive galleries and it just occurred to me that Google Photos is literally perfect for scrolling through at high res or low res.
I'll probably have to get a new plugin for before and afters. The most popular thing now seems to be 'sliders', a movable line that shows a before and after that looks like it's only one image. You just see more of the 'before' if you slide left and more of the 'after' if you slide the line right. While that does look cool, it comes with a restraint: You absolutely have to take both photos from precisely the same angle, so if you're off by a few inches or so, that effect is destroyed. Most of these photos are already taken, so we can't redo them.
Anyone have a gallery plugin suggestion that fits the bill for before and after shots?

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hi @Clay Carson, what particular theme are you using? For example, our agency almost exclusively uses Divi. Its built-in image functionality is very robust and would make pretty quick work of this. Combined with the add-on Divi Booster, there isn't much you can't do with images. Because of Divi, it is extremely rare that we need to use another 3rd party image plug-in. If we weren't using Divi, we'd probably go with Elementor. I would assume that Elementor would have similar capabilities but I'm not familiar enough with it to give advice. I'm tagging @Conor Treacy who is an Elementor guru.

You may not want to switch your theme. Hopefully another forum member will share their experience.

Good luck!

 

[Conor Treacy]

Hey @JeffClevelandTN thanks for tagging me in on this.

For before and after we use a few different methods depending on the client, but what we've found more often than not is that people rarely go past a handful of images. So even if you have a massive gallery of images, they generally look at 3 or 5 and call it good.

What we've done in the situation where the images are taken at different angles is made it into a single large image with text on the top image saying "before" and text on the bottom image for "after". Make a single image that's 1200x1200 or larger if you want people to zoom in. Then just post as a column/row gallery. So not using a gallery plugin at all, just straight images.

If you decide to do the slidebar method, Elementor Pro has this built in. We've used it before for some clients, but as you mentioned, if it's not from the same angle, it loses it's effect. People are a little forgiving, but not much

NextGEN is kind of the grand daddy for galleries. They've been around a long long time. We tend to use them on photographer type sites.

If you're doing a lot with Elementor, check out the "Ultimate Addons for Elementor" plugin. They have a gallery image widget. With their images (when editing in the media area of WordPress) you can define "UAEL" numbers which act like a sorting number. It's the same place where you edit title, alt and description. So, in the case where you have images out of order, you can set it to sort using UAEL number and you're back in business.

The other way to make sure you images are beside each other is to modify the publish date/time on images. Then you can sort by date/time and your two images will be beside each other. We usually set the same "hour" but then change the minute as our ordering etc.

Hopefully one of those suggestions help you.