I've mentioned the idea of asking people to provide their own photos earlier in this thread and also that while it is a great idea, the people in my (still relatively small) group tend to be on the passive side and have never really participated in such projects when I had similar ideas before despite liking the idea. (This is probably the same reason why no one else has ever advocated for ME/CFS here or why even long haulers don't have advocates, except for one person who is at least trying. It is just how things here are unfortunately.)
The pictures are not for esthetic purposes. It is because of the Facebook algorithm, many people will just scroll over a simple text post (yes, even many pwME), which in turn tells Facebook that the post is uninteresting and it shouldn't show it to more people. Currently FB only shows your post to an extremely low number of your page followers, unless the post gets a lot of interest (it is their business model - if you pay, then more will see it). My posts usually don't gather such level of interest, because I'm still a small page, with mostly research and advocacy news and plain text posts (compare that to a page with cute dog photos or political issues and I've already lost and most of my followers, even the interested ones will never see what is currently going on with the NICE guideline or long covid for example). The FB algorithm sucks and unfortunately I have to trick it somehow, which is a constant struggle. (Currently I have to pay FB to show my posts to more of my own followers.)
Of course, I wouldn't use visually very loud photos, that was never the goal in any way.
Edit: and of course a link with the thumbnail of an image gets more interest, which would be the case for me when sharing an article from the website.
