Where Course Images Come From: Your Document, Stock, or Nothing At All

Images in e-learning have a bad reputation, and it is deserved. Most courses are padded with stock photography that illustrates nothing — the handshake, the sticky notes, the four people pointing at a laptop. This post is about the three ways an image can get into a CourseConverter course, and how to choose.

What are the three sources?

Images come from your own document, from the stock libraries, or from your media library. Your own images are almost always the best of the three, stock is useful in a narrow band of cases, and an empty section is frequently better than either.

When should I use images from my own document?

Always, if you have them. A screenshot of the actual system, a photograph of the actual machine, a diagram someone in your organisation drew — these carry information. They are the reason the learner is reading, and no stock library has an equivalent.

Embedded images in a Word document are extracted on import and placed near the content they illustrated. You do not need to do anything special beyond putting them in the right place in the document.

When is a stock photograph worth using?

When there is a concrete, photographable subject in the content and no image of your own. "Hands sorting printed documents into folders" earns its place in a module about records management. "Business success" does not earn its place anywhere.

The test is whether you could describe the photograph to someone without using an abstraction. If the honest description is "some people looking positive", the image is decoration and decoration costs the learner attention without returning anything.

CourseConverter will request at most two stock images per module during AI import, and is instructed to skip rather than reach when the subject is abstract. Everything it picks is re-hosted on our storage so it cannot vanish when a stock provider changes their catalogue, and attributed in the caption.

What about illustrations rather than photographs?

Illustration is often the better answer for process, concept and scenario content, where a photograph would be literal and unhelpful. The built-in illustration library recolours to your course theme, which means a set of them across a course looks deliberate rather than scavenged.

A consistent illustration style throughout a course reads as designed. A mix of photographs, illustrations and screenshots with no pattern reads as assembled in a hurry, whatever the quality of the individual images.

When is no image the right answer?

More often than most courses assume. Consider leaving a section imageless when:

• The content is a short procedure and the steps are the point.
• The only candidate image restates the heading.
• You are adding it because the section "looks bare" — that is a layout problem, not an image problem.
• The image would be the third similar one in a row, at which point learners stop seeing them.

Do images affect accessibility?

Yes, and it is the part most often skipped. Every meaningful image needs alternative text that says what the image conveys, not what it depicts. "Screenshot of the approvals screen with the Submit button highlighted" is useful. "Screenshot" is not. Purely decorative images should have empty alt text so screen readers pass over them rather than announcing noise.

Imported images arrive with whatever alt text the AI could infer, which is a starting point rather than a finished job. It is worth a pass through the editor before you publish anything that people are required to complete.

Where do the images actually live?

Every image in a CourseConverter course is stored on our own storage, including stock images, which are copied rather than linked. That matters for two reasons that only become apparent later.

The first is that a linked stock image can disappear when a provider reorganises their catalogue, and a course full of broken images is worse than a course with none. The second is portability: when you export to SCORM or HTML, the images are packaged into the file. The exported course works offline, on an air-gapped LMS, and years after anything else has changed.

A workable rule

Use your own images wherever you have them. Add stock only where you can name the subject in concrete terms. Use illustrations for concepts, consistently or not at all. And when the honest answer is that no image helps, leave the space — a clean section reads better than a padded one, and your learners have seen the handshake photograph before.