This is a question we get asked, directly and indirectly, from clients of all sizes. It’s something we work hard on scoping, and something we see absolutely wild ranges on from others in the industry.
Pop Quiz, Question 1: How many photos do you think a photographer can take in an hour? If we’re shooting at high shutter speeds on a beautiful sunny day, we can take anywhere from 10 photos to 100 photos each second. In studio, it can take an hour just to set up a single shot.
Question 2: How many photos do you actually want your team to have to go through to find the right one? I go through thousands of photos, video clips, and graphics every day for dozens of clients. On the other hand, we’ve had teams express that they are overwhelmed by folders with 30 images.
All of this is to illustrate that the question shouldn’t be how many photos you get, but how many photos you need. And of course, it’s a range.
We quote the same way: for typical hotel rooms and commercial real estate, we estimate 2-5 photos per room. If the room is filled with hand carved furniture and hand painted decor, maybe we add on 1-2 photos per item. For events, we typically estimate 10-20 photos per hour. If it’s a concert, there might be more, and if it’s a conference with one keynote speaker (and zero costume changes), it will be much less.
And of course, you don’t want to be given every photo that was taken. I have 500 photos of my cat on my camera roll on my phone, from this week alone. I have posted one of them. And in the same way, you don’t need 500 photos of your keynote speaker standing in front of a crowd. Getting the one takes a little longer, but saves your team time and is more valuable in the long run.
As a starting point, budget for 3 to 6 finished images per subject, product or SKU. These should include a hero shot, a couple of angles, a detail or texture shot, and a lifestyle or in-context shot if it applies. From there, the number scales with how many places that product needs to show up.
Where is this product going to live? An Amazon listing, your own e-commerce site, a catalog, social ads, and a trade show booth all want different things from the same product, so the shot count depends on how many of those channels you’re actually filling.
For e-commerce, a clean white-background hero shot, two to three additional angles, and a close-up on the detail that matter most. It could be the soft texture, strong stitching, your logo on the label. That’s usually four to five images per product.
For social and web, we also want to feature the product in lifestyle photography. That means hiring models, scouting locations, and spending at least a day shooting with the product(s) and the team. These shoots vary heavily in terms of deliverables, but a good rule of thumb is that you should be able to get 5-10 high-quality photos per location and a larger amount of “bulk” (as we affectionately refer to it) from any additional shooters, on par with the quantity of event photography (10-20 additional photos each hour or location).
The number also depends on how many SKUs and variants you’re shooting. If you sell the same product in six colours, you don’t necessarily need six full photo sets. Leave room in your budget for recolouring and compositing if this is a priority.
Generally though, for lifestyle images you can trust in the intelligence of your audience to know that the photo of the happy man with the vanilla protein shake would be just as happy with the chocolate protein shake.
Our most important advice before any shoot is to build the shot list first, organized by product and by where each image will be used. Our team spends as much time in preproduction and we do holding camera equipment, and it saves us so much time in the long run.
It’s a lot cheaper to add five minutes to a shoot for a shot you know you need than to schedule, style, and light a second shoot three weeks later because someone realized the product page was missing something. A tight shot list is what keeps a full day of shooting from turning into two.
Whether you’re finally developing your first product after years of prototyping in your garage, unveiling a line of 10 new flavours, or about to launch this year’s new model of your flagship item, we’ve got you covered. Reach out to our team and let’s chat about your next photoshoot.
