Facts About Before and After Photos
- 1 in 5 Google searches are for images
- Nearly 30% of regular Google search results contain images
Hi again it’s Ryan Miller with Etna Interactive and we’re going to do something today that we don’t do very often in our newsletter which is a little bit of self-promotion. I’m really excited to announce the launch of our new software for photo gallery management called Curator B&A.
Let’s take you through really quickly some of the features I think that are going to get you excited because it solves the most common problems that practices face that prevent you from getting more of your photos onto your site. It is ultimately a faster and better way for you to approach publishing.
We have to think first about the environment that you create for your patient. I’m brought back to the very first time I ever visited the Louvre in Paris. One of the first halls that I walked into looked a little bit like this:
Too much art and not enough ability for me to focus on and appreciate the work of the artist. Now just moments later I stepped into another hall with a very different experience. I was encouraged to sit, to contemplate and to really take in what the artist was able to achieve.
And after all, isn’t that what we want? We want the patient to see your work, contemplate your results and conclude that you are the best choice for their consultation. Now it could be difficult for that to happen when we see photo galleries that look a little bit like this wireframe:
Where the cropping is inconsistent, the aspect ratios are off and the area of focus, well, it looks to the patient as though you’re trying to manipulate or change their perception of your results. Now, we see that patients are more satisfied and your work ultimately looks better when we have consistent cropping and consistent aspect ratios.
What Curator B&A allows you and your team to do is the quick drag and drop right from your desktop into the gallery management software. The onboard cropping tool and the ability to select a fixed aspect ratio means that each and every photo will be sized proportionally and the live preview tool, well, it ensures that your before and your after will be consistently framed inside the photo. It eliminates the need for you to do any kind of pre-processing, and you don’t need to invest in additional software to get your photos ready for publishing to the web. It ultimately allows you to move the responsibility of publishing photos to the least technical person on your team because it’s so simple to use. And it creates an environment where patients are ultimately able to really sit, contemplate and appreciate your work and not focus on bad cropping or framing.
Now it doesn’t stop there. With Curator B&A we’re actually taking a step to help you protect your work as well. We hear more and more from our clients that they’re concerned about their photos being stolen and republished elsewhere on the web. The authentication of your work is critical today. Curator B&A does a couple of things that are ultimately going to help protect you and your work.
It will take the two images and stitch them together into a single file, making it more likely that they’re going to show up prominently in Google search. But not just that, it also takes the added measure of protecting your work with an integrated etched-in watermark. Now consider this example in the results you see on the screen. I did a search for BOTOX before and after and certainly we see some fantastic examples of work but I think one, in particular, stands out:
The example here from Lucere stands out because specifically they’ve not only taken the time to properly frame, crop with consistent aspect ratios and match their before and after photos into a single file, but they’ve also introduced an element of branding that allows them to stand apart in Google’s image-based search result.
With Curator B&A you have the ability to define either a text-based or image-based watermark. You can set its size, it’s relative position and opacity and apply that to all of your photos automatically, saving you even more time when it’s time to publish. So with Curator B&A, we’re going to help you protect your pictures. The most valuable evidence of the work that you perform inside of your practice with image stitching and with watermarking.
Now, in addition to that, we’ve thought a lot about the experience, not only the importance of ensuring that your images get found when people are searching on Google but how they are going to be consumed by users today well, who are out and about using their mobile devices. If you’ve ever been to the Winwood arts district in North Miami you’ll understand right away what I’m talking about. The power of bringing the art right to the end user, and really can you get much more mobile than riding around on scooters?
It’s a fun day and I’d absolutely recommend it if you haven’t done it before, but how does that relate to Curator? Well, we have to acknowledge that today the majority of searches that are happening, they’re not happening on desktop computers, they’re happening on mobile devices. Better than 68% of all medical web searches that are happening are happening on our smartphones.
In addition to that, if you do an analysis of your own traffic, what you’re going to find today is more than 60% of all of your users are on their mobile devices. And if we dive deeper into those analytics and we look at the popularity of photo gallery pages, what you’re going to find is somewhere close to 50% of all of your page views are happening inside of the photo gallery.
Now with Curator B&A we’re taking advantage of the smartphone’s features and mobile optimization to get you found more often and to keep users more deeply engaged with your before and after photo experience.
Etna clients capture 61% of Before and After search results nationally on mobile!
Curator B&A helps you rank higher in Google’s image search by automating some of the most difficult tasks of technical optimization, allowing your team to focus on the quick upload, not the time that it might take to carefully craft things like titles and alternative descriptions for your images. It also delivers a faster and more interactive experience for mobile users.
Well, we do things like automatically optimizing versions of the images for standard smartphones and those iPhones that have twice as much picture density and ensuring that each of those two users gets not only the best image quality but the fastest copy of the image.
By taking advantage of touch screen capabilities we deliver advanced interactions today for mobile users and by using something called a CDN or, content delivery network, we take copies of your image, and we place them nearby users no matter where they are in the world so they have the shortest possible distance to download which means the fastest download time.
Our partner, The Center for Cosmetic Surgery, saw a 6-fold increase in average daily click-throughs after adopting Curator B&A.
Now, in addition to that the last point we want to make is that Curator B&A ultimately, it’s the last photo gallery you’re ever going to need. We specifically address the challenge, the reality that, well, practices today have been online for a while and many of you will have experienced the pain of redesigning your website only to learn that your old uploaded photos, well, they no longer meet contemporary presentation standards. Curator B&A automatically stores a master archive, the largest version of the image that you choose to upload so that in the future, if the standards change—and I know we’re all working on large projection screens in our workspaces or tiny little watches in the future—we’ll always have that original image along with the cropping instructions, and we can create brand new photos on the fly as technology changes.
We’ve taken an additional step to future-proof the way your photo gallery functions by offering Curator B&A as a subscription-based service. So we can easily introduce new features as photo gallery presentations evolve and ensure that you get the latest technology for the lowest possible cost. Now if you have questions about Curator B&A we invite you just to reach out to us online or give us a call, our website contact information is at www.etnainteractive.com.
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