# Tips when naming images for SEO _Published on 26 March 2012 at 12:37 PM · Updated on 1 July 2025 · Around 2 minutes to read_ Quite often we forget that the average joe client, doesn’t have a clue how to do something as simple to us, as naming their images. I have spent many hours renaming images, working much harder than most clients are willing to pay me for, so I decided to start telling them that I want images named correctly, quickly finding out that there’s a lot more to this than even I thought as I watched my Dropbox update with new advice I gave them. Let’s start with a few rules: - No spaces - lowercase - Use hyphens instead of underscore to separate words, underscore cannot be viewed when a URL is underlined - No full-stop in the name, only before the extension .jpg - Don’t abbreviate - Only letters and numbers - Numbers should at least be double digits 01 – 09 if lower than 10 - Don’t start naming with numbers, they usually only represent the numerical order of an image - Abbreviations can be used at the end for things like thumb nail = tn or large lg etc but purely as reference for your developer - No more than 50 characters long - The main image types supported by browsers are .png .jpg and .gif This is how correct image naming looks like **product-name-01.jpg** or **product-name-tn.jpg** A few tips when working with images for the web - Use the progressive setting when saving in Photoshop to ensure that it shows something, rather than loads in bits on a page - Use img {max-width: 100%;} when doing responsive designs to scale proportionately - Thumb nails don’t need to show the entire image, zoom into something that is obvious and makes sense to the user - You must give your images a description`”The` These are just a few tips, if you have more suggestions, please feel free to share Filed under: [Design](https://craigjamieson.netlify.app/category/design/), [Development](https://craigjamieson.netlify.app/category/development/) [All writing](https://craigjamieson.netlify.app/blog/)