I was always inspired by images but in the beginning I would never publish them with my stories. Eventually, I decided to share the montages I did for myself as inspiration. I got great feedback about them. Being a bit OCD however, for a while when I was inactive, I would spend hours hunting down series of pictures, and never actually get to writing. It may be that being sick I didn’t have enough energy to write, but still it made no sense.
First, as was mentioned by others, images should never be a necessary aspect, the text has to stand alone. There is a whole history of illustrations in literary books, but it must be something that complements and enhances the experience, not something required. They can inspire your descriptions, but those descriptions must be sufficient to evoke the character’s looks without them.
Second, if you go the way of images, make sure they fit the text as closely as possible. I too have been put off by images that ruined my experience of the story, in a way that @nycboot describes. In my case, I am turned off by posed seductive pictures of heavily muscled men, especially when the story does not describe the character as such. It’s always a big risk: you can easily alienate your readers.
Third, I don’t believe that images accompanying text is necessarily a violation of the pure medium of text stories. We live in non-binary times, anything is possible. When you write stories you want to stimulate your readers, and each of them have their unique way of being affected by verbal and visual stimuli.
Fourth, on the other hand, never feel that you absolutely need to have images to “compete” or that your story is incomplete without them. I put them because I like them and they’ve become a part of my style. Still, I’m always taking a risk, I’m sure i may have lost some readers because of them.
In any case, I think the priority should always be the words. If your descriptions can be improved by spending one more hour on the words, don’t spend that hour making an image montage instead.
