Online Usability guru Jakob Nielsen in his recent “Photos as Web content” article discusses Photo usage on the Web.

This post is just a quick summary. Original article is a must-read!

Summary:
Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to “jazz up” Web pages.

4 takeaways:

1. People Photos = Good (If They’re Real People)
2. Product Details = Good
3. Big Photos = Good (When Requested)
4. Information-Carrying Images = Good
   • Users pay attention to information-carrying images.
   • Users ignore purely decorative images that don’t add real content to the page.

Original article:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/photo-content.html

Further reading:
http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780321549730