Images and files
Your own photos, stock photography, and files people can download. Everything lives in one library per site, so a picture you upload once can be used anywhere.
The short version
- Double-click any image in the editor to swap it.
- Upload your own, or search stock photos without leaving the editor.
- Everything goes into your site's Assets library.
- Images are never stretched out of shape. They crop instead, and Reposition chooses which part shows.
- Describe your images, for the people who cannot see them.
Swapping an image
Double-click it. You can pick from your library, search stock photos, upload something new, or describe a picture and have it drawn for you, without leaving the page you are editing.
Your library
Everything you upload is kept per site, so you are never hunting for the picture you used on another page. Once you have a lot, folders make them findable. The Assets page in the sidebar holds the lot, images and files, and you can upload several at once or drop them anywhere on the page.
Stock photos
Search from inside the editor and use anything you find. Free to use, nothing to attribute.
Use them for atmosphere, not for evidence. A stock photo of a generic office says nothing about you; a real photo of your actual shop, taken on a phone, works harder than any of them.
Images are never stretched
When a picture does not fit the shape it is going into, it is cropped rather than squashed. That is not a setting and cannot be turned off.
A stretched photo is the single most recognizable sign of an amateur site, and it is never what anybody actually wanted. If the crop is cutting off the wrong part, select the picture and use Reposition: drag the photo to move it, and slide from Show more to Zoom in. It works on background photos too, and on a phone-width preview it sets the phone version separately.
Getting a photo to look right
Select an image and use Fix / Crop to open the image editor. It has four tools: Crop, Add space (widens or heightens the picture to fit its spot, on a plain background, instead of cutting it off), Trim blank edges and Remove background. It shows how the result will look on your page, Start over puts it back, and nothing changes until you press Use this image. Edits are always made from your original upload, so editing twice never costs quality.
Start with the source picture where you can. A well-framed photo needs no tools; a badly framed one needs several and still looks handled.
Describing your images
Every image can have a description, which is read aloud to visitors using a screen reader and shown if the picture fails to load. Search engines read it too.
Say what is in the picture, plainly. "Our shopfront on Bridge Street" rather than "image" or "photo1". Purely decorative pictures do not need one.
To find the ones you missed, use Check image descriptions in the editor's More menu. It lists every picture without one, can check every page, and can write the missing descriptions for you.
Files people can download
Menus, price lists, forms, brochures. Upload a file and link to it from any page, which you can do by double-clicking a link and pointing it at the file.
A PDF menu is worth having as a real page too. People read a page on their phone; they hesitate to download a file.
Keeping your site fast
Photographs straight off a modern camera or phone are far larger than a website needs. They are handled for you when you upload, so you do not have to resize anything first. A picture of any size is accepted, and a phone photo that would have landed sideways is turned the right way up. Documents can be up to 25 MB each.
How much room you have
Each website on your plan brings 5.4 GB of storage, shared by every site in your workspace. The Assets page shows how much you are using. When it is full, remove some files or add a website for more room. If your subscription lapses, uploads pause, but every file you already have is kept.