The blog post image conundrum

I’m always having a debate with myself about how to handle images for blog posts — and whether they need images at all.

I’ve struggled a lot with images in blog posts. There are times when I’ve had large, key images for each post. There are other times (like now) when I’ve had none. More rarely I’ve tried making those images optional.

I’ve always been frustrated with the results.

Choosing images introduces a lot of friction to writing new posts. For each post I feel like I have to:

• Choose (or make) an image
• Write a caption
• Write alt text
• Provide proper credit (including links and licensing terms)

My own photos, mediocre as they are, are safest. They also tend to be pictures of trees, turtles, flowers, or other subjects that tend to sit very still — which makes them hard to relate to the post content.

Also with images, I tend to worry about the processing and distribution of the images:

• Is the quality good enough?
• Is the compression high enough?
• Have I made them sufficiently responsive?
• Am I storing too many in my git repo?
• Should I be using a different delivery method?
• If I don’t store the images in my repo, how am I going to manage all the responsive versions of the images?

I love that we can send images in many different formats and at many different sizes, then let the browser pick the best match. That’s great. Less great is the amount of compute this requires, and whether a sudden bot invasion will cause my hosting costs to skyrocket.

That’s a lot of stuff to worry about when the image you’re posting isn’t actually all that relevant to the content of the post.

I don’t have any answers here, really. What do you think about images in blog posts? What’s the role of a lead image in something like this? Which sites seem to navigate this well?