Field guide

Photo documentation for construction and site inspections

Site photos are taken in a hurry and read under pressure, often by someone who was never there. The difference between a useful archive and ten thousand orphaned images is a routine.

The shot you cannot retake

Everything on a site eventually gets covered. Rebar disappears under concrete, services vanish behind plasterboard, membranes go under screed. Once covered, the only record that the work was done correctly is the photograph taken beforehand.

Pre-cover photography is the single highest-value habit in site documentation. When a dispute arises two years later about whether something was installed, the argument is settled by whether someone photographed it, and whether that photograph can be placed in time and space.

Reinforcement and formwork before every pour
Mechanical, electrical and plumbing routes before closing walls or ceilings
Waterproofing and damp-proof membranes before covering
Insulation and fire-stopping before boarding
Excavations and foundation bearing before backfill

Consistency beats volume

A progress record only works if successive photographs are comparable. Twenty images a week from the same five positions is more useful than two hundred from wherever someone happened to stand.

Pick fixed positions — corners, a stair core, each elevation — and mark them on the plan.
Shoot the same positions in the same order on every visit.
Shoot the whole area before any detail, so details can be located.
Photograph the same element from the same side each time.

What each photo needs to carry

A site photo answers four questions: what, where, when, and who recorded it. If a photo cannot answer all four on its own, it depends on a filename, a folder or somebody's memory — and all three fail eventually.

Date and time come from the camera. Location comes from GPS, if it was enabled. What and who are contextual and usually need to be added.

The practical issue is durability. Metadata lives inside the file and is routinely discarded when a photo is shared — a problem covered in why your photos lose their location data. Site photos travel constantly: into reports, email chains, WhatsApp groups, contract administration systems. Most of those journeys strip EXIF.

Rendering the details into the visible image solves it. Metadata Engraver stamps capture date, coordinates, a readable address and optionally a small map onto each photo on-device, plus custom text for the plot or work package and a logo for the firm. Because the information is in the pixels, it survives every one of those journeys.

Keeping a crew consistent

The hardest part of site documentation is not what one careful person does. It is getting six people, on three sites, to do the same thing.

Templates help more than instructions. A saved layout fixes which fields appear, where they sit, what size and colour they are. Share it once and everyone's photos match without anyone remembering a procedure. Batch stamping then applies one design across a whole walkthrough — up to fifty photos at a time, each keeping its own date and coordinates.

The result is a set of photographs that look like they came from one organisation, because in the only sense that matters they did.

Photograph the compliant work

Inspection photography skews heavily toward defects, which is understandable and incomplete. A record consisting only of problems makes a project look like a catalogue of failures and provides no evidence that anything was done properly.

Photograph correct installations, completed fire-stopping, properly lapped membranes, clean welds. When a question is raised later about general workmanship, a record showing routine compliance is far stronger than the absence of a complaint.

Storage and retrieval

Keep originals unmodified. Stamped copies are for distribution; originals hold the complete metadata.
Fold the date into folder names — retrieval is almost always by date and area.
Back up off the phone the same week. Site phones get broken, lost and wiped.
Match retention to the liability period for the work, which is usually far longer than the project.

What a stamp does not do

A stamped photo is legible and durable. It is not self-authenticating. The app renders what the file records, and cannot verify that a device clock was correct or that coordinates were accurate; EXIF is editable with ordinary tools.

For contractual or legal purposes, the stamp is an aid to reading the record, not a substitute for it. Keep originals, keep site diaries, and treat the photograph as one strand of evidence among several. More on that in what a timestamped photo does and does not prove.

Common questions

How often should progress photos be taken?

Weekly from fixed positions is a common baseline, plus whenever something is about to be covered. The pre-cover shots matter far more than the interval.

Do site photos need GPS?

Not always, and on many sites every photo shares one address anyway. GPS becomes valuable across multiple sites in a day, or where which building or plot a photo belongs to could later be disputed.

Should the stamp include who took the photo?

It is useful on multi-crew projects. A custom text field carrying initials or a company name is usually enough; the photographer is not recorded in EXIF, so it has to be added deliberately.

Can stamped photos go into a report?

Yes, and that is the main reason to stamp them. Once details are rendered into the image, they survive being pasted into a document, exported to PDF and printed.

What about photos from subcontractors?

Expect them to arrive stripped of metadata, because they will usually come through a messaging app. Ask for a stamp applied at source, or require the original files.