In December 2025, iStock published research finding that 64% of consumers say they prefer real images in advertising. iStock is part of Getty Images, and it sells stock photography for a living.
So a company that makes money licensing you a photo of a stranger in a hard hat has published a number arguing you should photograph your own crew instead. That is a reason to take it seriously, not to dismiss it. The release does not publish a sample size, which limits how far you can push it.
Three options and what each costs you
Stock is cheapest and fastest. A few dollars a file, and you can fill a page before lunch. What it costs you is specificity: the photo is not your shop, not your team, not the job you finished last Thursday. A customer who has seen the same smiling technician on three plumbers’ websites has learned something about all three.
Your phone is free and the photos are true. What it costs you is consistency. Light changes, backgrounds are full of things you stopped seeing years ago, half the shots are the wrong shape, and most owners never get around to taking them.
A photographer costs money, a day of your schedule, and the work of cleaning up first. You get photos that are true and usable everywhere. (Clutch found only 13% of consumers name imagery as the first thing they notice on a new website, behind design and layout at 30%. New photos in a 2016 website are new photos in an old frame.)
What consumers say about real images
The same iStock release reported 83% of consumers globally say higher-quality images are more likely to stand out.
The deeper study behind it is Getty Images’ Building Trust in the Age of AI, from April 2024, built on four surveys fielded between July 2022 and September 2023 with MarketCast, 7,500 adults per survey across 25 countries. Getty found 98% of consumers agree that “authentic images and videos” are important in establishing trust, and 87% consider it important for an image to be authentic. Ninety-eight percent is close to everyone agreeing with a pleasant statement; the 87% is the one to keep.
On video, Wyzowl reported in December 2025 that 89% of people say video quality impacts their trust in a brand, down from 91% a year earlier. The sample was 266 people, small enough that the two-point move is noise.
All of it is stated preference. Nobody followed these people to a checkout, and none of it tells you how many calls a shoot will earn you.
The AI image problem is now a trust problem
The iStock release also found six in ten consumers say they distrust the advertising they see because they believe it is “AI-generated, manipulated, or inauthentic.” Getty put 76% in agreement with the statement “it’s getting to the point where I can’t tell if an image is real,” and those surveys closed in September 2023. Treat the 76% as a floor.
A visitor on your service page is not analyzing anything. They glance, sort the photo into real or not, and keep moving. A licensed photo of a smiling contractor and a generated one land in the same place, because neither is you.
The limit of that argument is worth stating. When Clutch asked 263 US consumers in June 2025 what makes them distrust a business website, the top answer was typos, bad grammar and placeholder text at 65%, then confusing navigation at 49% and broken links at 46%. Stock photography is not on that list, because Clutch did not ask about it. People say they distrust advertising they read as generated. No survey we have ranks stock photos among the top reasons anyone leaves a website. If you have typos, fix those first.
Where stock is genuinely fine
Stock solves a real problem: a finished website needs more photos than a small business has. We use it in five places:
- Blog headers on subjects you cannot photograph. An article about a filing deadline does not need a picture of your office.
- Backgrounds and textures behind a section heading.
- Products you resell that the manufacturer already photographed. Their shot of the water heater you install is better lit than anything you would get in your warehouse, and it is the same unit the customer gets.
- Concept testing in paid ads, before booking a shoot for an idea you might kill in a week.
- Placeholders during a build, on one condition: a date on the calendar to replace them. Most permanent stock photos on small business websites started as temporary ones.
In none of those cases is anyone asked to believe the photo is you.
What professional photography costs
We do not have a verified market rate for a shoot and will not invent one. Two numbers get quoted as though they answer the question. Neither does.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median hourly wage for photographers of $20.44 and a median annual wage of $42,520 as of May 2024. That is a wage, what a photographer earns as an employee, not a rate, what a business charges a client. BLS also reports that 66% of the 151,200 photographers in the country are self-employed, and the wage survey behind those figures leaves the self-employed out. Divide $20.44 into a quote and you have set a paycheck against a company’s revenue, which also covers cameras, insurance, editing time, travel, and the weeks the calendar sits empty.
Wistia’s 2026 State of Video Report, from a survey of more than 900 professionals across industries, found almost 40% of companies spent under $5,000 on video production in the past year, just over 30% spent more, and the rest had no separate video budget. That is video rather than photography, across companies of every size, so it sketches a broad market and says nothing about your shoot.
Since we cannot hand you a price, ask every photographer you call:
- What is in the day rate, and what is billed on top?
- How many finished photos do I get, and how soon?
- What are the usage rights? Website only, or ads and print too? Do they expire?
- Do I get the unedited files or only your selects?
- Who handles scheduling, staff releases, and permission to shoot on a customer’s property?
- What happens if the weather turns or half the crew calls out?
- Can I see the full gallery from a recent shoot rather than the portfolio?
Number seven does the most work. A portfolio is a greatest-hits reel; one full gallery shows what an ordinary day with this person produces.
A decision rule
If the photo shows your people, your place, or your work, it has to be real. If it is decorative, conceptual, or about something that is not yours, stock is fine.
Page by page: your home page hero is your place, so real. About and team pages are your people, so real. Service pages showing completed jobs are your work, so real. Before and after, real or do not run it. Google Business Profile, real. Blog header on a general subject is decorative, so stock. Texture behind a heading, same.
One case sits outside the rule. A photo presented as a customer, when the person in it has never hired you, is off the table whether it came from a stock library or a paid model. That is a claim about who has done business with you.
If you can only pay for some real photos this year, buy them in the order a customer meets them: home page, then your best-earning service page, then the About page.
What one shoot day covers
Build the shot list before the photographer arrives. That is what separates a folder of nice photos from one that fills every empty slot on your website for two years.
For most service businesses: the building inside and out at an hour when the light works for you, the team in what they wear to work, you for the About page, hands mid-job, finished work on site, trucks and signage, and the things you stopped noticing, like the counter and the shelf of parts behind it.
Ask for every setup in a wide crop and a tall crop. Websites want wide, phones want tall, and reshooting for shape later costs another day.
If your photographer shoots video, ask what is possible the same afternoon. LocaliQ surveyed more than 300 small business owners for its 2026 trends report, 87% of them in the US or Canada, and found only 26% use video marketing and advertising, one of the least-used tactics on the list. It also ranked as the tactic those owners were most satisfied with.
A shoot is the rare line item that improves every other channel at once. One folder feeds the website, the Google Business Profile, the ads, the email, and the social posts. When we run brand photography, the list is built backward from where the photos have to land, so what a customer sees before calling matches what they find when they arrive.
Open your home page and count the photos taken at your business. Then do the same on your best-earning service page and your About page. Those three counts are your shot list in miniature. If all three come back zero, the decision rule above has already put the pages in order: home page, then the service page that earns, then About.