This probably doesn’t apply so much for the static parts of a company’s web site, but in the case of corporate blogs (as is the case for personal blogs), the process of securing appropriate permission to use the pictures can be extremely frustrating, especially where the blog involves use of lots of images sourced from external providers. Even when sourcing images from well-known sites like Flickr, the process of contacting the copyright owner concerned and receiving a response from them often takes several days or even more than a week. This, I imagine, would make life particularly difficult for corporate bloggers, particularly when the pressure is on to pump out a high volume of work within challenging timeframes. And when you add to this any potential budgetary constraints associated with charges levied by copyright holders for commercial use of their work, the whole process must be a nightmare.

Personally, I have given up on using pictures from anywhere except Wikipedia. Whenever I post an entry these days, I just do a quick check on Wikipedia to see if there are any decent pictures and quickly check the statement permission regarding re-use of any ones that I like on the site. If there are no suitable pictures on Wikipedia, I just don’t bother looking anywhere else. The whole process of contacting the copyright holder and waiting for a response is just too time consuming and too hard.

As a youngish man, at first glance, I felt that either both of the pictures looked, well .. rather nice.

But on a closer look, the second picture does look much more professional with all of the features you describe. The standard of the first picture might be Ok if you are sharing it on a casual blog with a few mates, but it is not OK for a medium sized B2B enterprise, and unless proper captions, links etc. are included, the image created amongst prospective customers (or at least those who are reasonably tech savvy) might be one of slight carelessness or cheapness. This is not to mention the point which you made about captions and keywords etc. providing more opportunities for the appropriate use of keywords.

And none of this is hard, either. I don’t know what it’s like in conventional website design, but in blogging, WordPress makes it so easy. Even I can do it (though I have gotten into the bad habit of not using alternate text) and I don’t have a clue about html or the technical aspects of web site design or anything like that. So no one has any excuse about it being too hard to implement.

Also, from a point of copywrite perspective, some of the features which you mention above become a simple matter of common etiquette and legal necessity in cases where the enterprise in question does not own the rights to the picture. Sure, there are ways other than captions, headings or links to provide correct attributation (this could be done within the text of the discussion), but use of these features does make this process much easier and creates a much better impression on web site visitors.