Storing Photographs of Work

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What the photographs are for

Four purposes, and they have different requirements.

Evidence of condition before work. Which answers a substantial share of end-of-job disputes and needs a date more than anything else.

A record of what was done, particularly anything now behind a wall or under a floor.

Showing customers, which needs a small selection rather than everything.

And a reference for yourself — how something was configured, what part it was, which way round it went.

Why it fails

Not capture. The phone is excellent at this and everybody takes the photographs.

Retrieval. A camera roll is chronological and work is not — finding the photographs from a job eighteen months ago means scrolling through a holiday.

And mixing. Personal and work in one library, which is the commonest accidental disclosure in a small firm.

The arrangement that works

A folder per job, in the drive you already have.

Named consistently — job reference, customer, date — so that search finds it. The naming is the entire system, and no application substitutes for it.

Moved weekly, in a batch, which takes fifteen minutes and is the habit the whole thing depends on.

And a subfolder for before-photographs where the work is the kind that produces disputes, because that is the set somebody will need to produce whole.

What software would add

Automatic organisation by date and location, which most photo libraries do already.

Tagging and search by content, increasingly built in.

Sharing a selection with a customer, which a cloud drive does adequately.

And job-linked storage, which is what field service applications sell — genuinely useful where the volume is large and the jobs are numerous, and disproportionate below that.

The obligations

Photographs of a customer's property are records about that customer.

Where they are stored, who can see them, and how long they are kept are the same questions as any other data — and they apply regardless of the size of the business.

Photographs showing people require more care, and photographs used in marketing require the customer's agreement, which is worth obtaining in writing at the time rather than assumed later.

The retention question

Longer than people assume, for the ones that are evidence.

A dispute about work can arise years afterwards, and the before-photographs are the answer. Keep them as long as you would keep the paperwork, which is set by law rather than preference.

The rest can be culled. Twenty photographs of one installation is nineteen too many, and a five-minute selection at the end of a job makes the folder useful rather than exhaustive.

Storage volume, which is the one real cost

Photographs accumulate faster than any other file type a small firm produces.

A phone camera produces several megabytes per image, and a job with fifty photographs is a substantial folder. A year of that fills a consumer cloud allowance.

Which is where the tier step arrives — and it is one of the more predictable ones, because the growth rate is knowable from the last six months.

Two things reduce it. Culling at the end of each job, which is worth doing anyway for findability. And archiving completed years to a drive rather than keeping everything live, which pairs with the backup arrangement.

Video, separately

The same task with ten times the storage and worse retrieval.

Occasionally the right record — something intermittent, something that has to be seen moving, a fault that is hard to describe.

Usually a photograph and a sentence would do, and the sentence is searchable where the video is not.

Where video is taken, note what is in it in the folder or the filename, because nobody will scrub through it later to find out.

Sharing with the customer

A link to a folder beats attachments.

Attachments are size-limited, arrive out of order, and cannot be added to. A shared folder link is the same mechanism as sending any large file and it lets you add the final photographs after the last visit.

Set an expiry where the drive supports it, and share the selection rather than the working folder.

The before-photographs, specifically

The set that earns the whole practice.

Five minutes at the start of any job on somebody's property, photographing what is already damaged, marked or awkward.

It costs five minutes on every job and it is repaid the first time somebody says a scratch was not there before. The same reasoning as any contemporaneous record: a photograph taken on the day beats a description a month later.

Take more than feels necessary, because the one you did not take is the one that becomes the argument.

And take them before anything is moved, which is the part people forget when the first act on arrival is to clear a space.

Where they belong at the end

With the rest of the job record rather than in a separate photographic world.

One folder per job holding the quote, the correspondence, the photographs and the invoice is what makes any of it retrievable, and splitting photographs into a different system defeats it.

That is the arrangement this site keeps arriving at from different directions, which is not a coincidence — it is the same requirement seen from each task. Additional context is available from Grammarly.

The short version

• Four purposes: condition before work, record of what was done, showing customers, and reference for yourself
• Capture is never the problem; retrieval is, because a camera roll is chronological and work is not
• A folder per job in the drive you already pay for, named consistently, moved weekly in a batch
• The naming is the entire system, and no application substitutes for it
• Photographs of a customer's property are records about that customer, with the same obligations as any other data
• Keep the before-photographs as long as the paperwork, and cull the rest to a five-minute selection per job