How to take job site photos that protect you

The cheapest evidence you'll ever collect

Most invoice arguments aren't about whether you're honest — they're about whose memory wins. “That mark was already on the bench.” “I never asked you to move the power point.” Each of those is a money conversation, and each ends in about four seconds when the photo exists. The economics are lopsided: the photo costs seconds; its absence costs the discount that ends the argument. The only reason tradies lose these disputes is that the photo wasn't taken, can't be found, or doesn't show anything useful — and all three are fixable habits.

The four photos that settle arguments

1. Before you start. The site as you found it: existing damage, the scuffed floor, the crack that was already in the tile. This is the photo that answers “you did that” with “it was there on day one”.
2. What you found. The rot, the corroded pipe, the botched previous wiring, the missing insulation — the discovery that justifies the variation. It's the photo customers most need to see to believe the price.
3. What the customer asked to change. When the scope moves — the vanity shifts walls, the layout changes mid-job — photograph things as they stand when the change is agreed. It anchors the change to a date and shows the re-work it caused.
4. What you left behind. The finished work, the tidied site, the reinstated garden bed. This photo defends your workmanship and clean-up when a complaint arrives after someone else's trade has been through.

Composition: evidence, not Instagram

An evidence photo has one job — letting a stranger understand what they're looking at, later, without you narrating. That means:

• Shoot in pairs. A wide establishing shot that shows where in the building you are, then a close-up of the detail. A close-up of rot could be any rot in any house; the wide shot ties it to the lounge window of this house.
• Put something in frame for scale. A tape measure is best; a glove or pencil beats nothing. “A crack” and “a 4mm crack across two tiles” are different conversations.
• Same angle, before and after. Stand in the same spot for the after shot. Matching pairs read as proof; mismatched angles read as two different stories.
• Light it. Under-floor and in-ceiling discoveries are exactly where phones shoot worst. Torch on, two extra shots — blurry dark evidence is barely evidence.

When to shoot: before anything gets covered

Some photos have a deadline. Wall cavities before the plasterboard goes on. Trenches with the pipe bedding visible before backfill. Waterproofing membranes before tiles. Reinforcement before the pour. Termite damage before the new timber goes in. Once it's covered, the photo is impossible and your word is the only exhibit — so make “photograph it before you close it” a fixed step in the sequence, the same as the clean-down.

Every photo needs a one-line note

Here's the failure nobody warns you about: the photo survives, but its meaning doesn't.

The note doesn't need craft — job, date, what the frame shows, and what it justifies. Speak it or type it, but attach it to the photo at the moment you shoot, while the context is still in your head.

The camera-roll graveyard

Ask a tradie for the photo that would settle a dispute and watch them scroll: four thousand images, six jobs interleaved with the kids' sports day, and the one that matters might be from either of two bathrooms that look identical. That's the camera-roll graveyard — the photos exist and might as well not. Evidence you can't find loses the argument exactly like evidence you never took. The fix is filing at capture time, not search time: every job photo lands on the job it belongs to, with its one-line note, the day it's taken. Whether that's an app, an album per job, or emailing yourself with the job name in the subject line matters less than doing it while you still know which bathroom is which.

Common mistakes

• Only shooting the problem. The close-up without the establishing shot proves rot exists somewhere in the world, not in this house.
• Skipping the day-one photos. Pre-existing damage claims are the most common argument and the easiest to pre-empt.
• Covering up first, photographing “later”. There is no later for a tiled-over membrane or a backfilled trench.
• No note, no context. A bare photo weeks later proves far less than you think it does.
• Everything in one camera roll. Unfiled evidence is unfindable evidence.

Where TradieCue fits

The camera is your phone's — TradieCue doesn't change how you shoot. What it fixes is the graveyard problem: photos attach to job notes on the right job, alongside the spoken or typed one-liner that says what they show. So the rot photo lives on the Harris job next to the note that explains it and the variation draft it justifies — not at position 3,412 in a camera roll. When you need to “pull up the records”, it's one job, one screen. And to be straight about limits: it's an organised record, not a forensic one — no tool makes a photo legally bulletproof, and how much weight evidence carries in a formal dispute is a legal question.

Common questions