How to Optimize Your Before & After Photo Gallery
As a facial cosmetic surgeon, your before and after photos matter: they show your future patients the kind of results they can expect, while also serving as a useful tool for discussing treatment plans in consultation.
Thus it is critical for facial cosmetic surgeons to establish practice workflows to support the creation of robust digital before & after photo galleries. This effort goes beyond images: you will want to include details describing each result, and ensure your gallery is curated to showcase a wide variety of patients.
Whether you are just establishing your practice or you are reassessing your photo-taking setup, here are tips for optimizing your patient gallery from American Board of Facial Cosmetic Surgery (ABFCS)-certified surgeons.
Take high quality photos
For your before and after gallery to give potential facial cosmetic surgery patients a genuine look at your aesthetic skills—and for your photos to provide an accurate account of each patient’s transformation for their medical record—all patient photos must be taken in a highly professional manner.
The secret to achieving this kind of before and after gallery is consistency within your practice: your photo studio setup will lay the groundwork for a unified portfolio of images that accurately exhibit your work. Following are the elements of a consistent before and after photo setup:
1. Camera & camera position
Begin with a high-quality digital camera with a standard focal length that you and your staff have been fully trained to use. Camera settings should be noted for consistency. You should also invest in a high quality tripod to maintain the camera’s position, marking where the tripod’s feet should be placed on the floor of the room where you take photos.
2. Backdrop
While many cosmetic surgery offices lack the space for a dedicated photo studio, you can designate a plain wall in a consultation or treatment room to function as the backdrop for your photos. The most important element is still consistency, so place tape on the floor to demarcate the location of the camera and where the patient should stand for each image to maintain the same positions in front of the background.
3. Lighting
The temperature, strength, and angle of lighting used for taking your patient photos is absolutely critical to a professional-appearing gallery. As such, you must set up your before and after so that the lights will always be the same from person to person, and over time for recording fully healed results. Ideally, you will have specific lights solely used for photos, placed at an appropriate height to show accurate contours; i.e. the light should not be so high (or low) as to create shadows that can obscure the results. This means you should avoid using overhead lights in the room when taking photos. Additionally, choose lightbulbs with a consistent strength and neutral temperature of light (i.e. not warm or cool). While lighting may seem like a subtle point, these details are critical to giving your gallery a coherent, professional appearance.
4. Patient positioning & expressions
Good facial cosmetic surgery before and after images require views of the face, head, or neck from various angles to show the nuances of their appearance. Patients should be positioned in consistent locations with their gaze resting at consistent points. Place markers on the floor where feet should go and at points on the wall where patients should direct their gaze: you’ll need a mark for front views, side views, 45-degree angle views, and back views (where relevant).
5. Consider the details
Patients are always curious to know what scars will look like after facial cosmetic surgery, so consider going the extra mile by including close-ups of healed scars after facelift, rhinoplasty, eyelid lift, liposuction, and other procedures. Further, with skin treatments like laser and microneedling becoming increasingly popular add-ons to cosmetic surgery, consider taking before and after photos of patients throughout a treatment series to show future patients the results you can achieve with non-surgical modalities. Neurotoxin injections photos can also make noteworthy additions to your gallery; here you will need to consider what facial expressions will best show the effects of treatment.
Establish workflows for consent forms, taking photos, writing captions, and posting
Once you have your photo studio setup, train staff on using the camera and directing patients in photo sessions. You will also need to meet with your team to establish workflows for the following tasks:
- Having patients sign appropriate consent forms before photos are taken
- Conducting the photo sessions as a routine part of pre-operative and post-operative appointments
- Photo cropping, as needed
- Making sure patient details are available and writing helpful descriptive information to accompany each patient’s photos
- Uploading before and after photos to your website where online consent was given
- Sharing before and after photos on your social media accounts
The final three steps are typically tasked to a knowledgeable member of the practice staff, who can run the finished product by the surgeon to ensure that the details are accurate.
Choose the right photos for the gallery
Patients browsing before and after galleries (or your social media) may or may not have experience with cosmetic procedure terminology, or be familiar with nuanced techniques. As you select results to include in your public gallery, choose clear and understandable results that the layperson will be able to appreciate.
Include as much patient information as possible
Information about each patient’s unique surgical case takes your gallery to the next level. While you will need to stay within the boundaries of what the patient agreed to have shared publicly, certain details can typically be included in the listing to help prospective patients understand the details of each case, such as:
- The patient’s age
- The concerns that the patients asked to have corrected
- The procedure(s) performed, and any special techniques used (i.e. the deep plane facelift)
- How many months post-op the “after” photo was taken
Patient care coordinators or other knowledgeable staff may compile these captions for your website gallery and follow a workflow that facilitates regular additions of new patient photos to your practice gallery. It can be wise for you as a surgeon to set aside time each month to review new patient photo additions and add any special knowledge to the captions.
Share before and after photos on social media
Your social media is a great place to show the “behind the scenes” at your practice and OR, to be sure, but don’t forget to also share new sets of before and after photos! This content shows your capabilities and gives you the chance to educate your followers by discussing nuances of each technique and surgical case.
Social media is not the only place you can re-use before and after photos: embedding before and after photos in educational blogs and pages on your website can further enrich your content.
About the American Board of Facial Cosmetic Surgery
The American Board of Facial Cosmetic Surgery (ABFCS) is dedicated to certifying safe, skilled cosmetic surgeons. ABFCS surgeons have proven experience in a full range of facial aesthetic procedures and devote all or a significant portion of their practice to offering them to patients. Our surgeons are passionate about achieving highly refined results with advanced, modern techniques and advancing patient safety.
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