How to Prepare Image Content for the Historic England Website

Images that support our brand

All images on our website need to support our brand.  

Read Historic England's brand guidelines on photography 

Images that work on all devices

The majority of visitors to the website are using mobile devices and tablets (53% and increasing in April 2019). Always bear in mind how your image will look on a mobile screen. On smaller devices, the detail in images is more difficult to see and text can be impossible to read.

Images that respect privacy

Don't reveal unnecessary personal information in a photo.

Make sure that people have agreed for their photo to be used on the website, and have given their consent.

Even when posting a photo of an unnamed person, consider whether their clothing or surroundings could be used to identify who they are or where they live:

• School or company uniform
• House number
• Car registration number

File format and colour mode

Format:

• Jpeg - for photos and illustrations
• PNG - for logos

Colour mode

• RGB

File size

• Big - approx 2,000 pixels wide
• But not too big - max 2,600 pixels wide and file size 1 megabyte

If you don't have photo-editing software, use a free online tool to optimize image files:

• Shortpixel
• Tinyjpg
• Bulk Resize
• Compressor

Orientation and crop

We accept landscape and portrait formats. Landscape works better with a lot of our templates. If you have a landscape option, please supply it.

Images are not usually cropped, with one important exception...

The photo at the top of the page

The image at the top of the page above the text is called a 'feature image'. The website template crops it into a wide and shallow rectangle so please make sure your image can work when cropped this way.

Depending on the device being used to view the page, the feature image could be cropped to any of six sizes. Don't crop the image yourself. Supply the full image for us to upload. The website will do the cropping.

Filenames

The filename should briefly describe what the image is of. More than a quarter of all Google searches are image searches. Meaningful file names help our images to rank higher in search results and bring more people to our website.

So for example, P-H00163-002.jpg could be renamed east-india-dock-london-P-H00163-002.jpg. Leave out stop words like a, the, in, of and use hyphens (not an underscore) to separate the words.

Captions

All images should have a caption. In general, use the caption to highlight an important aspect of the image or page text.

Keep captions short. If there's a lot to say about the image, include it in the page text.

If the image shows a historic place, always identify it in the caption. If it shows a listed place, please supply the list entry number. 

'Alt' text

The purpose of alternative text is to enable blind and visually impaired readers to understand images using screen readers which voice the text. Alt text is also read by search engines like Google to determine the content of the image.

Tips for writing alt text:

• Keep it short - just enough to communicate the content of the image and its function. Avoid unnecessary detail. The most popular screen readers cut off alt text after 125 characters (including spaces)
• Don't repeat the caption - only share additional information. Screen readers will read out both caption and alt text. If there's no additional information to give, leave alt text blank to avoid repetition.  
  
• Consider the context - the alt text for an image will vary depending on the content that surrounds it. See how context influences alt text
• Consider low-vision users - some people with low vision may be able to navigate the image with the aid of the alt text (rather than the alt text being a substitute for the image itself). It's worth bearing this in mind to inform the alt text you write. For example:

Caption text:

Portrait of the London by Willem van de Velde the Elder, about 1660. © National Maritime Museum

Alt text:

Pencil and wash illustration of a warship viewed from the side, with a flag flying from the stern at right. Only the lower portions of its masts are visible. At top left is a separate drawing of a Union Jack.

In this example the medium is included because it makes the nature of the image come alive. The positions of the image elements given in the alt text here make the image legible to someone with low vision. 

Alt text for infographics

For a chart, please supply us with a table of the data and text summarising the trends it illustrates.

For an infographic, please supply all the text the infographic contains along with your page text.

Copyright and attributions

Please always supply copyright details.

One condition of Creative Commons licences is attribution. See some examples of how to attribute.

If the photograph is from the Historic England Archive, please include the image reference number. Where possible, use the Link Text / Link Target fields to link to the Archive's image record.

Consent forms

While we don't require consent forms for photos taken of adults in public places, we do for photos that include any children under the age of 18 in the shot.

How to send us your image content

On larger projects involving multiple pages, sending image content by email won't be practical.

Please supply images together in a .zip file using any file sharing website, such as wetransfer.com. Email the link to [email protected]

Gather all your caption, alt text and copyright information together in the template below and supply it with your zipped image file.