Before/after gallery: regulation, UX and SEO setup

The before/after gallery is the most clicked and most debated component on clinic websites. In aesthetic surgery, hair transplant and dental clinics it is what the patient wants to see before deciding; it is also the content type the regulation addresses most directly. The new Regulation on Promotion and Information Activities in Health Services, published in Turkey's Official Gazette on 12 November 2025, repealed the 2023 regulation and introduced a dedicated article that makes the use of before-and-after images conditional. This article explains how to carry those conditions into the structure of the site, how to make the gallery honest and useful for the user, and how to publish the images in a form search engines can see. It is an implementation note, not legal advice; read it together with your clinic's legal counsel.

What the regulation says: the list of conditions

The visual content article of the new regulation ties the use of patient images to a set of conditions. In our reading, the clauses that directly affect a gallery page are these:

• Explicit consent from the patient, or from the parent or guardian if the patient is a minor or under guardianship; the regulation defines a consent form as an annex for this and requires the consent to be obtained in writing or electronically.
• The patient's right to see the image before it is shared, and to withdraw consent at any time without being bound to any procedure; a withdrawal request must be processed immediately.
• No payment, discount or gift may be given to the patient in exchange for permission to share images.
• No subsequent technological alteration or correction may be applied to the images; display without misleading make-up.
• Before and after images of a medical procedure must be displayed under the same environment and technical conditions, and the dates must be stated.
• Which health professional the image belongs to, whether it is of a real patient or quoted, and if quoted, the source, must be stated.
• No images of the patient during a medical intervention or surgery, and no images of intimate body areas.
• Posts containing visual content must be made by the health facility or the professional themselves; they may not be published as sponsored or paid placements.
• User interactions such as comments, likes and re-shares must be disabled on visual posts.
• Images used in domestic promotion must carry the warning statement that results may vary from person to person and that a detailed opinion should be obtained from the physician before the procedure.

The international health tourism article additionally requires that promotion directed abroad be run through a separate website or social media account, that the health tourism authorisation certificate be published on the site, and that the HealthTürkiye logo be used across all channels. So the gallery aimed at international patients lives in a structure separate from the domestic site; the visual rules of the two sites are shared, the audience separation is strict. There is a separate obligation on the personal data side as well: health data counts as a special category under the Personal Data Protection Law, and promotion consent and the data-processing notice are not the same document. We collected regulation-compliant text patterns in the medical content and promotion regulation article; that piece was written against the 2023 text and should be read together with the new regulation.

Move the consent flow into the CMS

Most of these conditions are met not on paper but in the content management system. The structure we apply in the clinics we work with is this: every image pair is a record in the CMS, and that record carries the date and number of the consent form, the procedure date, the capture date of each of the two images, the physician publishing the image, the channels covered by the consent (domestic site, international site, social media) and the withdrawal status. The consent-scope field matters; if the patient consented only to publication on the international site, the image must not appear on the domestic site, and that decision should be made by the system, not the editor.

The withdrawal flow is a separate process. The regulation requires immediate processing; in practice this means that deactivating the record is not enough. The image's cache on the content delivery network has to be purged, the image removed from the image sitemap, copies on social media taken down and, where necessary, the image cache in search results cleared with Google's removal tool. Tying these steps to the record in the CMS as a checklist removes any debate about who does what when a withdrawal request arrives.

An honest gallery for the user

The regulation's "same environment and technical conditions" condition is also a good user-experience rule. Pairs shot from the same angle, in the same light, at the same distance and against the same background let the patient trust that the difference they see comes from the procedure. In presentation we prefer side-by-side display to a slider comparison; a slider, when screenshotted, shows only the "after" state and hides the date information. Under each pair sit the name of the procedure, the procedure date and the capture dates of the two images, the physician's name and the required warning statement.

What turns the gallery from a showcase into decision support is context. For each case, what was done, the healing process described with the range given by the physician, and the note that the result is specific to the individual answer both the spirit of the regulation and the patient's need. Headlines containing promises, comparative phrases such as "the best result" and sentences that pin down the treatment duration do not appear in the gallery. Filtering is by procedure; fields such as patient age or gender are not shown unless explicitly covered by the consent. We discussed the relationship between this gallery and reputation signals in the patient reviews and E-E-A-T article.

SEO and technical setup

Gallery pages fail search at two extremes: either a single page where hundreds of images are piled up with no text, or dozens of near-identical thin pages opened for each image pair. The right structure is one gallery page per treatment: its own title, a short description of the procedure, the image pairs belonging to that treatment and a link to the treatment page. Image pairs do not get their own URL; they are reached within the page through a section id.

On the image side, the recommendations in Google's image SEO documentation apply: short, descriptive file names; alt text that relates to the page context and is not stuffed with keywords; responsive sizes with srcset and always a src fallback; and an image sitemap for images Google would not otherwise discover. Alt text here is also a privacy decision; the alt text describes the procedure, not the patient. For layout shift, web.dev's advice is applied directly: width and height attributes on every image, or a CSS aspect ratio, so the page does not jump while the gallery loads. Pairs below the fold are lazy-loaded, the first visible pair is not; the largest contentful paint measurement usually comes from that first pair.

hreflang tags between language versions are defined for gallery pages too; if the international site is on a separate domain the tags work across domains as well, but the texts on the two sites must not be copies of each other. This whole setup is a standard part of technical SEO work; in projects where the gallery was built by the design team alone, the consent fields, the withdrawal flow and the image sitemap are usually missing.

Conclusion

The new regulation does not ban the before/after image; it makes it conditional, and most of those conditions are properties a good gallery should carry anyway. A gallery that embeds the consent and withdrawal flow in the CMS, presents pairs under the same conditions and with dates, tells each case with context on a single page per treatment and publishes the images in a form Google can see answers the audit and the patient's question at the same time. Leave the legal interpretation to your counsel; the technical and editorial setup can be run with this list.

Sources

• Regulation on Promotion and Information Activities in Health Services (12.11.2025) — Antalya Provincial Health Directorate
• Image SEO Best Practices — Google Search Central
• Optimize Cumulative Layout Shift — web.dev