When someone sees a missing pet post, they are not reading it. They are scrolling, and something in the image either catches them or it does not. If it does, they read. If it does not, your description was irrelevant no matter how well written.

What makes a photo work

Just your pet in the frame. Group shots, people holding them, other animals nearby, all of it splits attention. Crop until there is one animal and nothing else competing.

Daylight, and their real colour. Filters are the single most common mistake. A warm filter can turn a grey cat into a ginger one, and now the person who saw your cat this morning does not connect the two.

Face visible and roughly front-on. A beautiful photo of your dog running away from the camera through a field tells nobody anything. Head up, eyes visible.

Recent. A puppy photo of a five-year-old dog is actively misleading. Use something from this year.

Show the thing that makes them identifiable. A white flash on the chest, one folded ear, a distinctive collar, an unusual tail. If your pet looks like a thousand other pets of that breed, the identifying mark is what turns a maybe into a call.

What to write underneath

Keep it short. Somebody standing on a pavement holding their phone is not going to read a paragraph.

The things that earn their place: the pet’s name, the street or junction they went missing from, one or two identifying features, and a phone number. That is genuinely it.

Leave out anything that only matters to you. How much you love them, how long you have had them, how upset the children are. It is all true and it does not help a stranger identify an animal in a hedge.

One thing worth adding

If your pet is nervous, say so, and say what to do instead of approaching: “please do not chase, call this number and we will come to you.” A frightened dog that gets chased can cover several miles very quickly, and a well-meaning stranger can turn a two-street problem into a two-town one.

Build a free flyer with your photo and see how it looks before you decide anything else.