apna.live
Every business putting a website together hits the same problem: it needs pictures, and taking them is a job nobody has time for.
There are three routes. They are not equivalent, and one of them has a rule attached that a lot of people do not know about.
Your own photos, taken on a phone
Cost: nothing but time.
Quality: good enough, if you follow a few rules.
Trust: highest of the three, by a long way.
This should be the backbone of any local business's images. Customers can tell the difference between a real shop and a stock library, and the real one converts better even when it is technically worse.
The rules that make phone photos work: daylight rather than tubelight, clean the lens, get closer than feels natural, tidy the background, tap to focus, take ten and keep three.
Best for: your premises, your team, your actual work and products, before-and-after, anything a customer is trying to judge.
Professional photography
Cost: ₹8,000 to ₹40,000 for a half-day, in most Indian cities.
Quality: clearly better, especially for food, interiors and people.
Trust: high, as long as it still looks like your actual business.
Worth paying for when the images are doing heavy commercial work: a restaurant's menu photography, a hotel's rooms, a boutique's collection, a clinic's premises. In those categories the images are the product, and the gap between a phone and a professional shows.
Not worth it for a plumber, a hardware shop or a coaching centre, where authenticity matters more than polish.
If you do book a shoot, get more than you think you need — every service, every room, every dish, plus verticals for phone screens. You are paying for the day either way.
AI-generated images
This is where it gets more nuanced, and where there is a hard rule.
Cost: very low.
Quality: convincing at a glance, often odd on inspection.
Trust: depends entirely on what it is being used for.
Where AI images are reasonable
Backgrounds and abstract art — a gradient, a texture, a decorative header. Nobody is being misled.
Illustrations of concepts — an icon set, a diagram, a hero image that is obviously decorative.
Poster and offer graphics — a festival banner, a promotional graphic, where the image is clearly a design rather than a photograph of your shop.
A placeholder while you take real photos. Reasonable, as long as "while" actually ends.
Where they are not
Anything a customer would take as a photograph of your business. An AI image of a salon interior on your salon's website is a misrepresentation. The customer walks in expecting that room.
Your products. If you sell it, photograph it. An AI image of a cake you did not make will produce a complaint on delivery.
People presented as your team or your customers. Do not do this. It is dishonest, and AI-generated faces are increasingly recognisable.
Before-and-after images. Faking a result is a serious problem in any category, and in health and beauty it is a regulatory one.
The rule people do not know
Google's policies for Business Profile photos require them to be real photographs of the business. Uploading AI-generated or stock imagery to your Google listing is not permitted, and Google has been tightening enforcement on profile imagery.
So even where an AI image might be acceptable on your own website as decoration, it should not go on your Google Business Profile. That listing is meant to show the actual place.
If you use a tool that offers to fill your listing with generated images, do not.
The practical arrangement
Google Business Profile: real photographs only. No exceptions.
Your website: real photographs for anything representational — premises, team, work, products. AI or stock is acceptable for decorative backgrounds and abstract headers, where nobody could mistake it for a record of your business.
Social media: real photographs for the work; generated graphics are fine for posters and announcements, where the design nature is obvious.
The honest starting point
A new business with no photographs is in a genuinely awkward position, and it is fine to launch with a decorative header while you build a real gallery.
What matters is that the decorative image is clearly decorative, and that within a month you have twenty real photographs of the actual business.
Set the habit: three photographs a week, taken as the work happens. After a year that is a hundred and fifty images of your real work — something no competitor can copy and no AI can generate.
Apna.live starts you with a designed header and lets you replace every image with your own, from your phone. See yours.
Run a local business?
See your own website first. Pay only if you like it, from ₹149/month.