I am going to make the assumption that you are looking at laptops with a dual core i5 or i7 CPU rather than the quad core variants.
Since it seems you are only using the laptop to run MS Office and only store photos on it, then you are not really doing anything that is very demanding. Therefore, you will not be able to tell the difference between a core i5 and i7 CPU. Unless you are doing very intensive tasks like heavy statistical analysis or financial modeling, then you can see a little better performance with the Core i7.
As for the difference between a SSD and HDD, the SSD has much higher read and write speeds. A SSD will make a laptop feel more responsive because everything loads faster.
Lets say you will actually be doing financial modelling with the laptop and the size of the Excel file you are working with is 12GB. A laptop with a Core i5 and SSD will be able to open the file much more quickly than a laptop with a Core i7 and HDD. But the laptop with the Core i7 CPU will provide you with results from the financial model quicker than the laptop with the Core i5.
If you are just doing "normal" office work like putting together a financial report, emails, and writing documents, then a Core i5 and the SSD would be the better combo to get.