Is your Pic-Time blog actually being seen?

Short answer: your Pic-Time blog looks gorgeous to your couples, but Google struggles to read it and AI tools like ChatGPT can't read it at all. I found this out testing my own website, and I couldn't find one blog post explaining it in plain English. So here's mine.

First up: I love Pic-Time

This isn't a dig at Pic-Time. I use it, I rate it, and I'll keep using it. It's brilliant for delivering galleries, and the blog feature is genuinely great: you can knock out a good-looking blog post in minutes, embed it on your website, and feel like you're on top of things.

And that last bit is the problem. It's easy to feel like you've blogged. But if Google and AI tools can't properly read what you've written, nobody new is finding it. It's blogging to make ourselves feel better, not blogging that brings in couples.

What “embedding” actually means

When you embed a Pic-Time blog, you're not putting the blog on your website. You're putting a window on your website that looks through to Pic-Time.

Your page holds a small bit of code. When a couple opens the page, their phone or laptop runs that code, which goes off to Pic-Time, fetches the photos and words, and paints them into the window. To a person it looks perfect, like the blog lives on your site.

But the photos and words are still sitting on Pic-Time. Your page only holds the instructions for fetching them. That difference doesn't matter to a couple scrolling on their phone. It matters a lot to Google and to AI.

Who actually reads your website

Three kinds of visitor read your blog, and they read it very differently.

• Couples. They open the page on a phone, the code runs, the window fills, and they see your lovely blog. All good.
• Google. Google sends a robot to read every page so it knows what to show people when they search. Google's robot can run that window code, but it does it later, and it doesn't promise to do it properly every time. And when it does, your words are tucked inside the gallery window rather than written on the page itself, which counts for less.
• AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. More and more couples ask these things “who's a good relaxed photographer for my venue?” Most of their robots read the page as it first arrives, before any code runs. So they never open the window. They don't see your blog at all.

What I found when I tested my own site

I tested one of my real wedding blogs, a Glen Dye wedding with a 1,181-word write-up and 279 photos, embedded from Pic-Time.

Two more things surprised me:

• Pic-Time publishes its own copy of my posts on my gallery address, and offers those copies to Google too. So Google can find the same story in two places, with nothing clearly telling it which one is mine.
• To be fair to Pic-Time, they've thought about this. The words of your blog are tucked into that bit of code so search engines can find them. But tucked away in code isn't the same as written on your page, and most AI tools never look there.

Why this matters: fewer blogs, actually found

We blog for one reason: so the right couple finds us. The couple who's just booked your favourite venue and types “[venue] wedding photographer” into Google. Or asks ChatGPT “who's a relaxed photographer for a barn wedding near Edinburgh?”

If your blogs can't be read, they can't answer either of those. You could post every week for a year and not get one extra enquiry from it.

Five blogs that Google and AI can properly read will do more for you than fifty that only look nice.

Less blogging, done properly, beats more blogging done for the feeling of having blogged.

The two-minute test you can do yourself

You can see roughly what an AI tool sees by switching off the code that fills the window. On a laptop, in Chrome:

1. 1Open one of your blog posts.
2. 2Click the little icon just left of the web address, then Site settings.
3. 3Find JavaScript and set it to Block.
4. 4Go back to your blog post and refresh the page.

Whatever's left on the screen is what most AI tools get. If your photos and story have vanished and you're looking at a menu and a footer, that's your answer.

Don't forget to set JavaScript back to Allow afterwards. (On Safari it's Settings, then Security, then untick JavaScript.)

What to do instead (and you can still keep Pic-Time)

This isn't about ditching Pic-Time. I still use it every day for galleries, and I still love it. It's about making sure the words and photos that do the hard work live on your own website, written in plain HTML that anyone can read.

1. 1Put the story on the page as real text. Write your story straight into your own website, not inside the embed. Even a few hundred words about the venue, the couple and what made the day theirs is enough. That's the bit Google and AI tools actually read.
2. 2Upload a smaller set of photos yourself. You don't need 279. Pick your best 30 to 50 and upload them to your own site. Give each file a proper name (dunglass-estate-winter-wedding-first-dance.jpg, not IMG_4471.jpg) and a short alt text describing what's in it.
3. 3Link to the full gallery. At the bottom, add a button: “See the full gallery on Pic-Time”. Couples who want all 279 can have them, and your page stays quick and readable.
4. 4If you keep the embed, put the words above it. If moving photos feels like too much right now, at the very least write your story as normal text on the page and keep the embed underneath for the photos. That one change makes the biggest difference.
5. 5Have a look at where Pic-Time publishes your blog. Pic-Time also shows your blog posts on your gallery site. Check those pages aren't competing with the versions on your main website. If you're not sure, ask their support team. They're lovely and they'll know their settings far better than I do.

And remember the big one: write fewer blogs, and make each one count. One proper post a month that Google and AI can read is worth more than a weekly embed nobody but your couples will ever see.

A quick word on Narrative

Not everyone uses Pic-Time for this. A lot of wedding photographers blog with Narrative (their Publish tool), and it's worth a word, because it's a different beast. Narrative is built for blogging rather than galleries, so the things that caught me out here are handled far better. It walks you through a description for every photo, which becomes real alt text, and it gives you proper title, web address and meta description fields. If you blog with Narrative, you're very likely in better shape than my Pic-Time test was.

The thing worth understanding is that it's usually still an embed, and your posts and photos still live on Narrative's servers rather than on your own site. Stop paying and they can vanish, and the alt text doesn't travel with you if you move. So the same honest question applies: are the words, and a few of the photos, actually written onto your own page? If Narrative lets you publish to a real page on your own domain instead of dropping a block of code into your site, lean that way. One small trap either way: don't fill in the SEO fields in both Narrative and your website, or they can clash and confuse Google. Pick one place for them. As always, their own help pages will know their setup better than I do.

The jargon, in plain English

That's it. If you take one thing away: your words need to be on your own page, not inside an embed. Keep using Pic-Time for what it's brilliant at, and let your website do the talking to Google.

If you give the two-minute test a go, I'd genuinely love to hear what you find. That's exactly the sort of thing The Co Lab is here for.