Capturing Great Job-site Photos

Janet: Hey, I’m Janet, the founder and managing partner at Fat Cat Strategies.

Don: Alright, Janet. Today, we’re diving into a topic that’s a bit of a tangent for us because it’s not something we directly do as an agency, but we help our contractors think through how to manage it. The topic is job site photos.

Janet: Picture time, picture time, it’s picture time. Here we go.

Don: I actually love this topic because if you take good job site photos—and it doesn’t take much to do them well—they can really elevate your digital marketing. But there’s a lot that can go wrong with job site photos, and I think we’ve seen it all. So, let’s talk about why good job site photos matter. For most contractors, when they think about job site photos, it’s usually like, “Yeah, I know I need them,” but it tends to be an afterthought. We really want to encourage contractors to move it from an afterthought to a priority. Why is that?

Janet: Well, people like pictures. That’s the simple answer. Let’s bring it back to the goal, which is a marketing goal. You’re not making a Ken Burns documentary of your work; you’re trying to connect with local homeowners, prove you’re a legitimate company, and generate enough interest for them to fill out a form or call you. So, what role do photos play in that? At a glance, a wall of photos on your website can tell a homeowner a few things. First, it shows that your company has been in business long enough to complete more than one project.

Don: They’ve done stuff.

Janet: Exactly. “Oh, look, they’ve done stuff. They know what they’re doing.” Another thing job site photos can do is showcase the aesthetic improvement your work provides. If the thing you’re installing is visually appealing, like new windows, a beautiful front door, or an upgraded exterior siding, it gets people excited. Even if it’s a roofing job, which is often a necessity due to leaks, we still want you to take pictures. Photos demonstrate that you’ve been in business, show that you’ve done good work, and can get homeowners excited about a potential project.

Don: So, I think everyone knows they need job site photos, and it’s important to recognize how we can use them effectively as marketers. But there are challenges in taking good project photos and ensuring they are actually usable on a website, social media, or other platforms. Let’s talk through the do’s and don’ts—what we’ve seen in terms of good and bad photos—and how we can help contractors avoid common mistakes. Let’s start with the negative and end on a positive note. What are some things we would encourage contractors not to do? How can they avoid silly mistakes?

Janet: I want to drill down on something you just mentioned: what’s usable. Let’s unpack that a bit because what’s usable depends on who’s using it and why. We’ve had contractors who were already in the habit of taking lots of pictures. Then, when we come along as their marketing agency and ask, “Do you have pictures we can use?” they say, “Oh yeah, we have hundreds.” But when we log in and look at their repository, we find that while they do have pictures, those images have a specific utility and are only “usable” for certain purposes.

These pictures were often taken during the course of the job to document issues like rotten wood or termite damage—basically, the ugly behind-the-scenes stuff. While these are important for the work being done, they’re not necessarily the kind of photos you want to showcase on your website or social media to attract new customers.
Certainly! Here’s a cleaned-up version of the transcript, keeping the content closer to what was actually said:

Don: Yeah.

Janet: When it comes to marketing, unless you’re writing a blog post about the damage that water can do, those aren’t the really pretty, beautiful after-shots we’re looking for.

Don: Not the stuff you want to showcase.

Janet: So before we get into the do’s and don’ts, if you’re already taking pictures in the course of installing the project, you might be doing a really good job of that, and you might be using, I don’t know, like a CRM, like Builder Trend where your clients have a login and they can see updates as the project goes. Those pictures have utility and they have use, but they may not be the best pictures from a marketing perspective.

Don: Yeah, I think you’re actually highlighting a great “don’t” there, which is: don’t just take pictures for your internal processes or for the customer’s benefit. You do need to take those photos, but you also need to think about taking pictures that are usable for marketing.

Janet: And what we’ve seen is we’ve seen contractors that have a really great process in place for doing that, but they totally forget to take the final picture when everything’s cleaned up and it looks really good because they’re busy and they’ve already moved on to the next job.

Don: Right. So, okay, a “don’t” to add to that is: even if you can get your guys in the field to take some photos at the end of the job—and we’re going to talk a little bit about how to build a process to make sure that happens—don’t just snap a photo for the sake of snapping a photo. If it’s just checking a box, you’re probably going to end up with a photo that really isn’t usable. You’ve got to actually have a process for how to get a good photo at the end of the job. So don’t treat it casually, because then you’ll get insufficient results that you don’t really want to use.

Janet: I love them. I actually find them pretty entertaining. So, you know, we will get on a call with our clients and say, “Hey man, we need some pictures.” And they’ll go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m gonna get you some pictures.” And then a week or two goes by, and they either send us pictures or we have some sort of shared Dropbox that we log into, and there’s a whole bunch of pictures. And what are they pictures of? It’s pictures of buckets, fast-food bags, ladders—lots of ladders, so many ladders, piles of garbage where you’ve taken all the wrapping off of building supplies, or part of a dumpster. My fave is the quarter-angle shot of the dumpster.

Don: Yeah, still in the driveway.

Janet: And, you know, that is either a before or a during shot. But that after shot—just take a minute to look around. If it’s an interior—we have a lot of bath clients—if it’s a finished bathroom, what was the thing that just happened with your client?

Don: Oh yeah, so I had a client just the other day who was like, “Hey, we just found this picture that got uploaded to our site, and we probably need to take it down because it’s a picture of a completed bath, and it looks really nice, but the showerhead was off the thing, on the floor.” So it was just kind of like, “Ah, it just conveyed an image of ‘We didn’t do the extra finishing touches here,'” and they didn’t want to have that on their site. Understandably, right? So it was just like that kind of thing—take an extra 20 seconds to just look at the scene that you’re shooting, make sure everything is polished and clean, and then even after you take the photo, look at the actual photo. You’ll catch some other things you didn’t notice, like, “Oh yeah, that towel hanging by the bathtub actually looks pretty dirty; we should have done that.”

Janet: And the showerhead hanging off the hook or just dangling into the tub—I can totally see how that happens. You’re busy; you’ve just finished an eight-hour day of doing a one-day shower install. You’ve had to clean up all your work, load up your van, you’re busy, and then your boss told you, “Hey, make sure you take a picture,” and you pop your phone out of your pocket, and you go, “There, I took a picture.” We’re not here to be overly critical. We completely understand that it can be hard in the moment to look around and spot a half-empty shampoo bottle or a Bojangles cup or whatever in the shot. But if you don’t take that shot at the moment, you’ve kind of lost the opportunity because once the homeowner moves back into that bathroom, you can’t call them three weeks later and say, “Hey, can you clean up your bathroom so I can come take a picture of it?”

Don: Yeah, not gonna happen. Okay, another couple of “don’ts” here, and I’ll throw these together because I think they work well together. One is: don’t be disorganized with your photos. And another one is: don’t take your photos and never use them. I see this happen a lot because it turns into, “Oh yeah, we’ve got some photos, but I think they’re on our project manager’s phone,” you know, the guy who finished the job. He took them, and they’re just sitting on his phone. He’s not sure what to do with them, where to put them. There’s no real organization system for once we take those photos—where do we upload them to? Who do I send them to? What am I supposed to do with those photos? And nobody really knows. So they’re either staying on the phones of the people who took them, or they’re all over the place, and nobody knows how to track them down.

Janet: Yeah.

Don: And then, you know, that can very easily translate into you’ve taken photos, but you’re not using them. Maybe because, A, you don’t know where they are, you don’t know how to get ahold of them, or B, you don’t really know what to do with them. Like, you’re not really sure what you’re supposed to be using those photos for. Like, “I probably ought to put them on the website, but I don’t really know what to do with that or how to do that,” or “I need to use them in social media, but I don’t know if they’re the right size or if they’re going to look good in those spots or not.” So there are all kinds of questions there, like not taking advantage of the work that you’ve actually done.

Janet: Yeah. A couple of ways we’ve seen folks organize it: I would start with the lowest-tech way first. The very first step to organization is taking a moment to realize, “Hmm, I think I need to be organized.” I’m kind of laughing, but seriously, if you just tell your installers and your project managers to take pictures and you haven’t given a little bit of forethought about how you’re going to collect those, how you’re going to organize them, and how you’re going to store and share them with whoever needs to have them, it’s a recipe for disaster. So if you’re going to have people do it on their phones, think through: what does that look like? Maybe you typically have a production manager’s meeting on Friday morning where you guys meet in the shop and get coffee—incorporate photo downloads into that meeting. And then take it a step further: appoint one person in the office to make it their job to say, “Okay, if we’ve got five guys with five phones and five sets of pictures, what are we going to do with those?” There’s just some mechanics of thinking through the process of naming the pictures, maybe putting them in a folder according to the customer’s name.

Now, I know that many of the CRMs that our clients use have features where you can associate photos with the job. I think it’s Job Nimbus, and maybe also Job Progress—I know Builder Trend does it, and I think a few of the others do—where through the course of managing each project, you can upload photos to the project. If your CRM has that, go for it. That’s an easy way to do it. And then, in the future, if the homeowner calls back and they want a second job or they’ve got an issue with something you installed, you’ve got all the documentation right there. So that’s one way. If you don’t have a CRM that supports attaching photos to the customer’s name, there are some other simple solutions. I’m guessing you’re probably either using the Google Workspace suite of products or maybe Microsoft 365. You’ve got some sort of system in your office—figure out what that system is and how you can use it. It could be a Dropbox folder, it could be a shared Google Drive folder. What are some things that you’ve seen?

Don: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors, a podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Digital Marketing for Contractors. This is a podcast all about helping home improvement contractors crush their lead goals and take their business to the next level. Digital Marketing for Contractors is hosted by Fat Cat Strategies. We are a digital marketing agency based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. My name’s Don, and I’m an account manager here at Fat Cat.

Janet: Hey, I’m Janet. I am the founder and managing partner.

Don: All right, Janet. Today we are jumping into a topic that I know is a lot of fun. It’s a little bit of a tangent topic for us because it’s not necessarily something that we exactly do as an agency, but we help our contractors a lot with thinking through how to manage it. And that is the issue of job site photos.

Janet: Picture time, picture time, it’s picture time. Here we go.

Don: I love this topic actually because if you can do your job site photos well—and it doesn’t take much to do them well—it can really elevate a lot of your digital marketing. But on the flip side, there’s a lot that can go wrong with job site photos, and I think we have seen it all. So let’s talk about why it’s important to have good job site photos. I know that for most of our contractors, when they think about job site photos, it’s kind of like, “Yeah, I know I need to have them,” but it’s often an afterthought. We really want to encourage contractors to bump it up in priority. Why is that?

Janet: Well, people like pictures. That’s the simple way to put it. If the goal is a marketing goal, and let’s bring it all back to why we’re doing this—because you’re not making a Ken Burns documentary of your work. The goal is to connect with local homeowners, prove to them that you are a legitimate company, and get their interest up enough that they’re willing to fill out a form or call you to inquire about your work. So what role do photos play in that? At a glance, they can tell a homeowner, “Oh, this company has been in business for a while.” They’ve been in business long enough to do more than one project.

Don: They’ve done stuff.

Janet: Exactly, they’ve done stuff. They look like they know what they’re doing. The other thing job site photos can do, if the thing you’re installing is aesthetic and nice-looking, like it’s an overall improvement to the look of the home, people get excited about it. It’s pretty, you know, “Ooh, pretty.” And so what falls into that pretty category? That would be things like window replacement, a really beautiful front door, an upgrade to your exterior siding, painting, kitchen remodels, bathroom remodels. Now, we have a lot of roofing clients. Roofing can improve the look of the home, but let’s be honest, most of the time with a roofing job, it’s a necessity—it’s a leak. But we still want you to take pictures of it. Pictures demonstrate that you’ve been in business, they demonstrate that you’ve done stuff, and they can get homeowners excited about a potential project.

Don: I think everybody knows these are necessary, we need to have them. And I think it’s good to recognize the importance of them and how we can use them as marketers. But there are a lot of challenges that come with taking good project photos and making sure they’re done in a way that’s actually usable on a website, in social media, or in whatever places we’re using them. Let’s talk through some of the do’s and don’ts of what we’ve seen for good and bad photos, and how to help a contractor make some of that work. Let’s start with the negative so we can end on a positive note. What are some things we would encourage contractors not to do? Like, this is what not to do, this is how to avoid making silly mistakes.

Janet: When it comes to marketing, unless you’re writing a blog post about the damage that water can do, those aren’t the really pretty, beautiful after-shots we’re looking for.

Don: Not the stuff you want to showcase.

Janet: So before we get into the do’s and don’ts, if you’re already taking pictures during the course of installing the project, you might be doing a really good job of that, and you might be using a CRM like Builder Trend where your clients have a login and they can see updates as the project goes. Those pictures have utility, and they have use, but they may not be the best pictures from a marketing perspective.

Don: Yeah, I think you’re highlighting a great “don’t” there, which is: don’t just take pictures for your internal processes or for the customer’s benefit. You do need to take those photos, but you also need to think about taking pictures that are usable for marketing.

Janet: And what we’ve seen is we’ve seen contractors that have a really great process in place for doing that, but they totally forget to take the final picture when everything’s cleaned up and it looks really good because they’re busy and they’ve already moved on to the next job.

Don: Right. So, okay, a “don’t” to add to that is: even if you can get your guys in the field to take some photos at the end of the job—and we’re going to talk a little bit about how to build a process to make sure that happens—don’t just snap a photo for the sake of snapping a photo. If it’s just checking a box, you’re probably going to end up with a photo that really isn’t usable. You’ve got to actually have a process for how to get a good photo at the end of the job. So don’t treat it casually, because then you’ll get insufficient results that you don’t really want to use.

Janet: I love them. I actually find them pretty entertaining. We will get on a call with our clients and say, “Hey man, we need some pictures.” And they’ll go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m gonna get you some pictures.” And then a week or two goes by, and they either send us pictures or we have some sort of shared Dropbox that we log into, and there’s a whole bunch of pictures. And what are they pictures of? Pictures of buckets, fast-food bags, ladders—lots of ladders, so many ladders, piles of garbage where you’ve taken all the wrapping off of building supplies, or part of a dumpster. My fave is the quarter-angle shot of the dumpster.

Don: Yeah, still in the driveway.

Janet: And, you know, that is either a before or a during shot. But that after shot—just take a minute to look around. If it’s an interior—we have a lot of bath clients—if it’s a finished bathroom, what was the thing that just happened with your client?

Don: Oh yeah, so I had a client just the other day who was like, “Hey, we just found this picture that got uploaded to our site, and we probably need to take it down because it’s a picture of a completed bath, and it looks really nice, but the showerhead was off the thing, on the floor.” So it was just kind of like, “Ah, it just conveyed an image of ‘We didn’t do the extra finishing touches here,'” and they didn’t want to have that on their site. Understandably, right? So it was just like that kind of thing—take an extra 20 seconds to just look at the scene that you’re shooting, make sure everything is polished and clean, and then even after you take the photo, look at the actual photo. You’ll catch some other things you didn’t notice, like, “Oh yeah, that towel hanging by the bathtub actually looks pretty dirty; we should have done that.”

Janet: And the showerhead hanging off the hook or just dangling into the tub—I can totally see how that happens. You’re busy; you’ve just finished an eight-hour day of doing a one-day shower install. You’ve had to clean up all your work, load up your van, you’re busy, and then your boss told you, “Hey, make sure you take a picture,” and you pop your phone out of your pocket, and you go, “There, I took a picture.” We’re not here to be overly critical. We completely understand that it can be hard in the moment to look around and spot a half-empty shampoo bottle or a Bojangles cup or whatever in the shot. But if you don’t take that shot at the moment, you’ve kind of lost the opportunity because once the homeowner moves back into that bathroom, you can’t call them three weeks later and say, “Hey, can you clean up your bathroom so I can come take a picture of it?”

Don: Yeah, not gonna happen. Okay, another couple of “don’ts” here, and I’ll throw these together because I think they work well together. One is: don’t be disorganized with your photos. And another one is: don’t take your photos and never use them. I see this happen a lot because it turns into, “Oh yeah, we’ve got some photos, but I think they’re on our project manager’s phone,” you know, the guy who finished the job. He took them, and they’re just sitting on his phone. He’s not sure what to do with them, where to put them. There’s no real organization system for once we take those photos—where do we upload them to? Who do I send them to?

Don: Okay, give us some wisdom on that. What do you need to know to take good photos?

Janet: Hold the camera relatively level.

Don: What are you talking about? The camera on the phone?

Janet: It’s going to be your phone.

Don: So, phone cameras are okay for taking job site photos?

Janet: Absolutely. Try not to hold them at some kind of crazy, cockeyed angle—keep it level.

Don: Yeah.

Janet: That’d be step one: hold your phone level. Make sure it’s relatively level. Check if your thumb, pinky finger, or something else is obstructing the lens. I can’t tell you how many close-ups of thumbs we’ve seen.

Don: And in that case, you might want to clean the lens before you take the photo. You know, you’ve got dirty contractor hands.

Janet: Yeah. Make sure your finger’s not in the way, and move the ladder. It could really be that simple. Take your Hardee’s cup or your Bojangles cup out of the shot.

Don: Yep, there you go. So pretty simple to get the job done. If you want to take it up a notch, especially if you’re doing anything exterior, you might want to time it in terms of the time of day so that you’re getting good outside lighting. Late afternoon tends to be the best time of day for taking photos, so you’re not getting crazy shadows over whatever you’re trying to take a picture of on the home. Or if you’re inside, you might want to play with the lighting. If you’re taking pictures in a bathroom, maybe you want the overhead lights on, but maybe you don’t. You might want to turn the overhead lights off and try turning on lights in other rooms to see what that does for your shot. Just experiment with it a little bit and see what improves your quality—taking it with a flash versus not. It’s not necessarily going to be the same for every photo, so be willing to take multiple photos. It doesn’t have to just be one. You can experiment with a few different things, try different lighting options, and different angles to see what you get. All of those photos are available. And, like you said earlier, you basically get one shot at doing this. So take advantage of that one opportunity—when you’re done with the job and about to leave the site, take as many photos as you can from as many different angles as you can, and then use what’s best.

Janet: The thing I would add to that when we’re talking about exterior jobs—let’s say you’re doing a full siding replacement—this takes a little more forethought. Try, if you can, to be thoughtful and mindful of where you’re standing when you take the before picture, and stand in the same place when you take the after picture. Before and after pictures resonate well when the viewer can quickly do that comparison. If you took the before shot from the leftmost corner of the yard, and there was a car in the driveway that obstructed part of the view of the house, and then for the after shot, you went to the complete opposite side of the yard with a different angle and there’s a bush in the way, the before and after won’t look like before and after.

Don: Not helpful. Yeah, from a marketing standpoint, that’s not going to do you any good.

Janet: And if you’ve got a really dramatic change—like rotten siding, changing the roof, gutters, windows, doing the siding, maybe some stonework on the front, and a great front door—that’s a great before and after project. Just be mindful and think, “Okay, I’m going to be thoughtful about where I stand.” And then to your point earlier about time of day, this would be next level—this would be the A-plus game. You decide, “Okay, I’m going to do the before picture from the end of the driveway, from a certain angle, and I’m going to do it at four-thirty in the afternoon.” When you do the after, stand in the same place and do it at four-thirty in the afternoon. And then A-plus-plus-plus with bonus points would be similar cloud cover.

Don: Yeah.

Janet: If you can get it. We do not have that expectation because a cloudy day and a sunny day will make the color look very different in that photo.

Don: Okay. I think we’ve covered a lot in this episode, so I think this is a great place to wrap it up. We do want to let you know that we have a free resource you can download called “How to Take Amazing Job Site Photos.” It covers a lot of what we’ve talked about in this episode and goes into more detail about how to make these things happen and do it well with your team. I think this would be a great resource to download and sit down with all your team leads to talk through these things and how you can implement them together as a company. So go to fatcatstrategies.com/photos, and you can download that free resource, “How to Take Amazing Job Site Photos.”

Janet: Don, I just wanted to end this episode with a note to the listener. If you’re thinking, “Man, this sounds hard,” it’s not. It’s really not. I just want to encourage people that the most important thing when it comes to marketing your home improvement company, especially regarding photos, is that we want authentic photos. So if you end up leaving a ladder in a photo, it’s okay. I mean, it’s not ideal, but an authentic photo is going to resonate with a homeowner in a different way than the professional photos that come from the manufacturer.
Don: Yeah, those stock photos can look pretty, but they aren’t going to resonate as much with your potential customers as your actual work.
Janet: So give yourself a break. Just start taking photos, and you’ll get better over time.
Don: You’ll get better over time. Okay, go check out our free resource, “How to Take Amazing Job Site Photos,” at fatcatstrategies.com/photos. You can download it right there. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, and we look forward to talking to you next time. See you then. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.