Wherever possible, avoid photos with text. There are two reasons for this:
- the text is often a distraction from the translation, since the word(s) in the image may be different from the actual word on the page. For example, although the Possibilties road sign on Pixabay may at first sight seem to be a good idea to illustrate the word choice, nonetheless, because the student will see at the same time the word "choice" (on the page) and the word "possibilities" (in the image), there is a slight confusion generated.
- the image may not necessarily be used in the language for which it was chosen, and therefore you should not assume that the person who sees the image necessarily speaks the language of the word(s) in the image. For example, consider again the Possibilties road sign on Pixabay for use on the English to French page for the word "choice"; although it may work in this context (since the student speaks English and is learning French), it might not work very well at all where Lingopolo is being used to teach a French person English (where the French person would know the word "choix", be learning the word "choice", but might not have a clue what "possibility" or "possibilities" mean), or even worse for a French person (who speaks zero English) learning Thai, or a Thai person (who speaks zero English learning French). Since you can assume nothing about the eventual source and target language, you should therefore avoid any images with text, even though today the source language is always English.
There may sometimes be a very similar image with the same basic idea but without text. For example, the Possibilties road sign on Pixabay might have a picture with the same concept without the words. I see an example on Shutterstock of the same basic concept without text, which would be ideal replacement if it weren't Shutterstock.
Sometimes it is possible to take a photo with text in and simply edit out the text to make a text-free version which still has enough visual information to illustrate the word. For example, this road sign on Pixabay could easily be edited to have the words removed, and still keep the idea of "choice".