Locale-specific imagery
Swapping photos, screenshots, colors, or gestures when the original image would confuse, exclude, or read differently in another market.
What it is
Locale-specific imagery is the visual side of localization: choosing a different photo, illustration, screenshot, map, color treatment, or gesture when the original would be confusing or culturally wrong in a target market. Images containing words are the obvious case, but products, clothing, homes, food, and everyday settings can also make an otherwise translated page feel imported.
Reach for it during market review, especially for campaigns, onboarding, instructions, and app-store screenshots. Put assets behind stable semantic keys so a locale can select a variant without forking the whole page, and localize the alt text along with the visible asset.
Gotcha: a country flag is not a language, and cultural rules are not a lookup table. Putting the flag of Spain beside the Spanish language option tells several hundred million Latin American speakers that the option is not really for them. The same locale can include many communities, while color and gesture meanings change with context: white reads as weddings and purity across much of the West and as mourning across much of East Asia. Use research and review by people from the target market, then keep a deliberate fallback for locales without a special asset.
Ask AI for it
Add locale-specific imagery with a typed asset manifest keyed by semantic purpose and BCP 47 locale. Resolve assets through the app's locale fallback chain, render them with Next.js Image, and keep localized alt text in the message catalog under the same semantic key. Provide a neutral default asset, never use flags as language selectors, and add a test proving that an unavailable pt-BR image falls back to pt and then to the default without breaking layout.