Choosing a Cover Image That Tells the Story

Before anyone reads your first sentence, they look at your cover. On a profile grid, in a topic feed or in the row of tiles at the end of another post, the picture is doing the introductions on your behalf. A good cover tells a stranger what kind of story this is and gives them a reason to tap. A weak one makes a careful, interesting post look like every other post nearby.

Choosing well is less about owning great photos than about asking the right questions of the photos you already have. Here is the way we like to approach it.

Know what the cover has to do

A cover has two jobs, and they pull in slightly different directions. The first is to say what the story is about. The second is to make someone curious enough to find out more. A photo that only does the first job is a label: accurate, but flat. A photo that only does the second is a tease that may leave readers feeling misled when the post turns out to be about something else.

The covers that work best manage both. A close-up of flour-dusted hands pressing dough says “this is about baking” and also “this is about the doing of it, not just the result”. A wide shot of an empty station platform at dawn says “travel” and also hints at a mood: quiet, early, a little lonely. Before you pick, try to name both things in a few words: the subject, and the feeling.

Start from the story, not the folder

The usual habit is to open the folder of photos from the trip or the project, scroll until something looks pretty, and use that. It often leads to the most beautiful picture rather than the most fitting one. Try working the other way round.

1. Write one sentence that says what the post is really about. Not the topic, the point. “A weekend in Đà Lạt” is a topic. “Why the best part of Đà Lạt was the morning market, not the views” is a point.
2. Ask which single moment in the story carries that point. In the example, it is the market, so a panorama of the hills is probably the wrong cover, however lovely it is.
3. Only then go looking for the photo of that moment.

If no photo matches the sentence, that is useful information too. Either the story is about something you did not photograph, or the sentence needs another look.

Plan for the crop

On PicaLook a cover is shown wide at the top of the post and cropped into squares and rings elsewhere: profile tiles, “more from” rows and the round category rings on a writer’s profile. The help centre puts it simply: keep the subject near the centre and leave a little breathing room around it.

In practice that means a few things:

• Avoid subjects pressed against an edge. A face at the far left of a wide photo may be cut off completely in a square tile.
• Be careful with text in the photo. A shop sign or a handwritten note can be charming at full width and unreadable, or oddly sliced, when cropped.
• Prefer one clear subject over many small ones. A table covered in twelve dishes becomes visual noise at thumbnail size. One bowl, close up, still reads.
• Check the shape in your head. Imagine a square drawn over the middle of the photo. If the story still shows inside that square, the cover will survive the grid.

Detail or wide shot?

Most stories can be told by either a detail or an establishing shot, and the choice changes how the post feels before a word is read.

A wide shot sets the scene. It works well for posts about places, events and anything where the setting is the point: a mountain route, a festival street, a renovated room. Its weakness is that wide shots tend to look alike at small sizes. Many landscapes collapse into a band of sky above a band of ground.

A detail pulls the reader in close. A worn tool handle, a single stitched seam, the steam over a cup. Details are memorable and survive cropping well, which is why they often make stronger covers than you would expect. Their weakness is ambiguity: without context, a detail can be hard to place.

A useful rule of thumb, offered as our preference rather than a law: if the title already names the place or the subject, a detail can carry the feeling. If the title is more playful or abstract, a wider shot can carry the facts. Let the title and the picture split the work between them.

When there is no right photo

Some stories simply do not have a picture. Essays, reflections and lists of advice often come from thinking rather than from a camera. It is tempting to reach for a generic image to fill the space: a laptop, a cup of coffee, a sunset. Readers have seen those pictures a thousand times, and they tell them nothing about your post.

Here it is fine to go without. On PicaLook, a post without a cover photo gets a pastel typographic cover with its title in large type, as described on the features page. An honest typographic cover is better than a borrowed photo that has nothing to do with the words. It also makes your photo-led posts stand out more when they do appear.

If you do use a photo you did not take, make sure you have permission and credit it, as the guidelines ask. A picture that fits but is not yours to use is not a good cover.

A quick check before you publish

Once you have a candidate, run through a few questions. They take a minute and catch most problems.

• Could a stranger guess roughly what the post is about from the cover and title together?
• Does the photo match the feeling of the writing, or does it promise a different kind of story?
• Does the subject still show if the picture is cropped to a square around its centre?
• Is it sharp enough, and bright enough, to read at the size of a small tile?
• Is it different from your last few covers, so your profile grid does not look like the same post repeated?
• Is it yours, or do you have permission to use it?

The cover is only the opening frame, of course. Once readers are inside, the pictures that follow and the words beneath them carry the story onward. If you want to think about that next step, our notes on sequencing images in a post and on captions that add something pick up where this one leaves off.