We have established that creating pages and news in SharePoint is easy and gives excellent results. As our intranet publishers get more experience, they are also asking more questions, such as “where are my page/news images stored?”
In proper SharePoint style: It depends! 🙂 on the original location of the image.
Let’s take a look at the various image sources. These are your 8 options when you add an image to a news item or a page. If our admin has NOT enabled the Organization Assets option you will not see “Your organization”.
A copy of the images used (for any page or news post) may be stored in the Site Assets library in your site, in a folder Site Pages. If yes, the page/post will get a new subfolder with the name of the page/post and the images used.
Experiment
To check what happens exactly, I created news items using each available option. I have no Organizational Assets library enabled in my tenant, but I know from work how it behaves.
These are the news items I created, with the name of the image source:
Results
Only Web search and Upload create a new folder.
The good thing is, that adding images is very economic; you seldom get copies taking up storage space.
I know storage quota is not really a thing anymore in modern SharePoint, but I have spent so many years worrying to keep SP2007 site collections within their 2 GB storage limit, that this topic will always be on my mind. 🙂
The bad thing is that you will not collect your used images in your site, if you plan to re-use them again. Also, if someone decides to remove their image from the internet or their SharePoint site, you may end up with no image. For News this will not be so serious as most news is volatile. For long-term and important pages, it may be worth keeping your images under your own control.
Results
In the overview below I am sharing my opinion on the various options, based on my experiences, together with their storage behaviour. I have added a ⭐ for my favourites. Feel free to disagree, I like learning from others!
Recent
👍 Convenient
👎 You have probably used this recently, so do you really want to use this again?
📂 No new folder, image is stored in its original folder.
Stock Images ⭐
👍 Good variety of images, freely available
👎 They might get over-used
📂 No new folder
⭐ This is the simplest solution if you need an image and do not want to spend too much effort
Web search
👍 All images you can think of
👎 Beware of copyright – finding out can be time-consuming, not finding out can be costly
📂 Creates new folder
Your organization ⭐
👍 Custom images suitable for your organization, no copyright issues (assuming you use your own and bought images)
👎 You need someone to manage these assets. I am lucky as our Communications manager is both a keen and expert photographer AND a tenacious intranet manager, so she really keeps an eye on this collection and is always happy to add new images when you ask.
📂 No new folder
⭐ Easy to use and this allows you to use specific imagery that fits your organization
OneDrive
👍 Nothing
👎 Private by default, so you need to share them first with your intended audience (see my earlier post, SharePoint Holmes and the Invisible Illustration)
📂 No new folder, the image stays in your OneDrive.
Site ⭐
👍 Easily available, good if you have custom images for your site, e.g. with specific theme or branding. Best option for long-standing pages as deletion is within your own control.
👎 Might become repetitive if you have used them before. When you are storing images in a separate library, you or fellow publishers need to remember where they are.
📂 No new folder, the images stay in the library where you have stored them.
⭐ Useful when you create content that will be relevant for a long time, and/or when you have custom illustrations.
Upload ⭐
👍 Familiar experience for most users. Best option if you want to use an image from your OneDrive – upload it from your OneDrive client.
👎 Nothing
📂 Will create new folder
⭐ Especially when you start using SharePoint you will probably have to dive into your own collection on your PC quite often. After some time you will probably be using your Site images, see above.
From a Link
👍 Good way to re-use suitable images across the organization
👎 This can only be a link to an image within your organization (OneDrive or SharePoint).
You need to know where the image lives and be sure that your intended audience has permission to see it.
The owner can remove it, leaving you with no image.
Once you have used it, it is quite hard to find the link to the image and the site. I could find it using F12 (developers tool) and search for the name of the site or the image (if you know) but that is not very convenient. Please let me know if you know an easier way!
📂 No new folder
Conclusion
My suggestion would be to use Stock Images, Organizational Assets, Site or Upload; they appear to be most user- and maintenance-friendly for short and long term.
Your experiences/opinion
Did I forget anything, or is there an option you really like or dislike? Please let me know!
Ellen's Digital Workplace 
One of the first things I do when I create a SharePoint site is to set up a document library called Images_[name of site/subsite]. I then save all images in there so they can easily be used by anyone. I train people to always save content on SharePoint first, then navigate to the Images library rather than using web search or upload. I find the Site Assets library a real pain as you have to remember what every single page is called in order to find and re-use an image. And if people get used to relying on SharePoint storing their content for them, I find documents get duplicated often. I also suggest users don’t take images from the Recent options as you don’t know where they are stored.
Thanks for sharing, Dani! Great suggestions! We are quite new to SharePoint News so it is helpful to hear from someone who has an established process. I will keep this in mind.
Best regards,
Ellen