Outside of digital marketing, I’m a photographer — primarily weddings — so naturally, I post a lot of galleries and blog entries showcasing the weddings I shoot. These posts are more than just photos; they’re little stories. I like to talk about the couple, the traditions they celebrated, the amazing vendors I worked alongside, and of course, the wedding venue.
And because my photos are like my kids (impossible to choose a favourite), I tend to post a lot of them. One of my favourite ways to present them is in a masonry grid. These layouts are beautiful — they let portrait and landscape images live together in harmony without ugly dead space, creating this immersive, visual flow that leads viewers through the day. Click on any image, and it opens up in a lightbox for a closer look.
Most of my blog posts included a few full-width impact images and then large blocks of masonry galleries so readers could scroll through whole sections of the day — like the ceremony, portraits, reception — quickly but with plenty of visual punch.
But then I noticed something strange.
The Problem with Masonry Galleries and SEO
I started realizing that some of my blog posts were ranking really well in Google — especially when people searched for venues like:
“Liuna Station wedding photographer”
“The Lakeview wedding photos”
“wedding photography at The Hummingbird”
These were older posts, from back when I was on Squarespace and didn’t have a masonry gallery plugin. Instead, I had simply uploaded multiple standalone images into each post. No fancy layout — just clean HTML and lots of alt text.
When I compared those top-ranking posts to some of my newer ones (which I thought were better in every way), I noticed a pattern. The newer posts, packed with beautiful masonry galleries, were not showing up in image search or getting the same traction.
Even though I was diligent — filenames were optimized, alt tags were filled in with venue names, keywords, the works — the galleries were obscuring the image metadata from Google’s crawlers.
What I Changed to Improve Blog Visibility
Once I realized the issue, I went to work retooling my posts.
Rather than removing images (which felt like deleting memories), I replaced the masonry galleries with structured CSS grid layouts. These weren’t full-size images either — I created divs and containers that grouped the photos into tight, responsive grids. This way, I could still include a ton of images in a visually appealing layout without relying on gallery plugins that hide image data from search engines.
Yes, it took more time to build out these custom grids. But I wanted to preserve the storytelling experience without sacrificing visibility.
Then I submitted a reindex request through Google Search Console and waited.
Within a few days, those updated blog posts started showing up in search results again — especially under Google Images for venue-based searches. I even started seeing traffic increase on posts that had previously gone quiet.
SEO Tip for Wedding Photographers & Bloggers
If you’re a photographer, especially in the wedding space, and want your blog posts to show up when people search for venues like:
“[Venue Name] wedding photographer”
“wedding photos at [Venue Name]”
“Hamilton wedding photography”
…you need to make sure Google can actually see your images.
Here are a few quick SEO wins:
Use descriptive filenames: e.g. lakeview-hamilton-wedding-ceremony.jpg
Include keyword-rich alt text like “Bride and groom portraits at Liuna Station, Hamilton”
Avoid gallery plugins that hide images behind JavaScript or obscure metadata
Structure your images with clean, semantic HTML or CSS grid layouts
And remember, Google doesn’t “see” your photos — it sees your filenames, alt tags, and the structure of your site. Make that stuff count.
Final Thoughts: Design vs Visibility
This was a reminder that good SEO is about more than keywords. It’s about viewing your website through two lenses — one human, one machine.
Sometimes that means making trade-offs. Your gorgeous plugin might make the site look better to users, but if it hides your content from Google, you’re losing opportunities. A big part of SEO is figuring out how to speak to your dream clients and to the swarm of little search engine crawlers combing through your site (picture the Sentinels from The Matrix, but less stabby).
I’ll still use galleries in the right context, but for key posts — especially those I want to rank for venue-specific search terms — I’ll stick with custom layouts and individually indexed images.
If you’re a fellow photographer or creative and want help optimizing your blog or site for search, I also offer digital marketing and SEO consulting — get in touch here.