The short version
- Shoot in even light, hold the phone level at chest height, and take the before and the after from the same spot.
- Keep house numbers, license plates, and faces out of the frame unless the homeowner says yes.
- Label every set with the town and the job, and send ten to twenty photos per job. Befores, afters, and a few details.
Photos do a lot of the selling on a contractor website. Before a homeowner calls a roofer in Puyallup or a remodeler in Beaverton, they scroll the site looking for a finished job that looks like the one they want, on a house like theirs, close to their street. Stock photos cannot do that. Your own jobs can.
You do not need a photographer or a new camera. A phone from the last few years takes photos good enough for any contractor website, as long as the light, the angle, and the label are right. Here is how I tell contractors to shoot a job.
What a homeowner looks for in a job photo
A homeowner looks at a job photo for four things.
- The whole job, clearly. The full roof, the whole kitchen, the entire patio. If they cannot tell what was done, the photo does nothing.
- A house like theirs. A split level in Kent, a craftsman in Portland, a rambler in Lakewood. Real houses tell them you work on their kind of home.
- How the crew leaves the site. A clean driveway and swept gutters in the after photo say more than a line about cleanup.
- The details that show care. Flashing around a chimney, tile lines that meet at the corners, a labeled panel, a clean conduit run.
Shoot for those four and the photos sell the job without a caption.
Light and angles
Light and angle decide whether a photo looks like a finished job or a snapshot.
Light
For exteriors, an overcast day is your friend. Northwest cloud cover gives soft, even light with no hard shadows under the eaves. On a sunny day, shoot in the morning or late afternoon, and keep the sun behind you or off to one side. Never shoot into the sun. The house turns into a dark shape against a bright sky.
For interiors, turn on every light in the room, open the blinds, and turn off the flash. A flash bounces off tile, glass, and new cabinets and leaves a white glare in the middle of the best part of the job. If one window blows out the whole photo, turn so the window is beside you instead of in front of you.
Before any of it, wipe the lens on your shirt. A phone that lives in a work pocket has a smudged lens, and a smudge turns every photo hazy.
Angles
Hold the phone level, at chest height, and do not tilt it up at the house. Tilting makes the walls lean in like the house is falling backward. Step back instead until the whole job fits.
Turn on the grid in your phone's camera settings and line up a roof edge, a countertop, or a fence line with one of the lines. Straight lines read as careful work.
Shoot every job in three distances.
- Wide. The whole job from where a neighbor would see it. For a house, stand at a front corner so two sides show.
- Medium. One part of the job, like the new entry, the vanity wall, or the retaining wall.
- Detail. One close shot that shows craft, like a flashing detail, a grout line, or a breaker panel with every circuit labeled.
Stay on the main 1x lens for most photos. The 0.5x ultra wide fits more in, but it stretches the edges of the frame and can make a room look bigger than it is. A homeowner who walks into a bathroom that looked twice the size online remembers that.
Horizontal or vertical
Shoot most job photos horizontal, with the phone turned sideways. Horizontal matches the shape of most jobs, like a house front, a kitchen wall, a backyard, or a driveway. It also fits project galleries and before and after sliders without cutting off the sides.
Shoot vertical for tall, narrow jobs, like a chimney, a stairwell, a shower, or a water heater in a closet. A vertical photo of a new shower shows the whole thing floor to ceiling, where a horizontal one shows a slice.
Whatever you pick, shoot the before and the after the same way. A horizontal before and a vertical after will not line up in a slider. When you are not sure, take both.
The same spot for before and after
A before and after only works if both photos are taken from the same place. When the two photos line up, the change jumps out. When they do not, the homeowner sees two different photos.
Before any work starts, pick a spot you can find again, like the corner of the driveway, a crack in the sidewalk, or the doorframe of the kitchen. Take the before from there. Then take a second photo of where you are standing, so you can find the spot in three weeks when the job is done.
A few rules make the pair line up.
- Same spot, same height, same direction.
- Same lens. If the before was on 1x, the after is on 1x.
- Same time of day if you can, so the light and the shadows match.
- Before anything moves. Take the before before the dumpster arrives and before demo starts.
Take a few befores, not one. The wide shot, the medium shot, and the problem close up, like the rotted fascia or the water stain on the ceiling. A homeowner with the same problem will recognize that close up.
What to keep out of the frame
A job photo on a website is public. Anyone can see it, including people you would not invite to the house. Before you take the shot, look at the edges of the frame.
Keep these out unless the homeowner says yes.
- The house number. Shoot from an angle that hides it, or step so a post or a tree covers it.
- License plates on cars in the driveway.
- Faces, the homeowner's and their kids' especially. Family photos on the walls count too.
- Mail, paperwork, and screens with names or addresses on them.
Ask the homeowner before you shoot inside, and ask again before a photo with a face or a recognizable house goes online. Keep the yes in writing, even if it is a one line text. Ask your crew before their faces go on the site too.
Then clean up the frame for the after. Pick up the scraps, move the ladder, roll up the cords, and take the portable toilet out of the shot if you can. Look at what the photo shows about safety too. A photo of a crew on a roof without the fall protection they should be wearing is not a photo to publish.
Label the town and the job
A photo with no label is a nice picture. A photo labeled "Roof replacement, Puyallup" is proof that you do roofs in Puyallup.
When you send photos, write the town and the job with each set.
- Kitchen remodel, Bothell, new cabinets and quartz counters
- Panel upgrade, Vancouver, 200 amp service
- Paver patio, Tigard, with a seat wall
The town ties the job to the town page. The job ties it to the service page. And the label becomes the text a search engine reads. Google's image guidance (opens in a new tab) recommends short, descriptive filenames, alt text that describes the image without stuffing keywords, and images placed near text about the same subject. "Paver patio in Tigard with a seat wall" does all three.
The same photos can go on your Google Business Profile. Google's photo guidelines (opens in a new tab) ask for photos that are in focus and well lit, with no significant alterations or heavy filters, so skip the filters and post the job as it looks.
How many to send
Ten to twenty photos per job covers it. Send more if the job was big, and delete the blurry ones first. Here is what a set looks like by trade.
| Job | Befores | Afters | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roof replacement | 2 to 3. Street view, the worst area | 4 to 6. Street view, each side, the ridge | 3 to 5. Flashing, vents, gutters |
| Kitchen or bath remodel | 2 to 3. The whole room, the problem | 4 to 6. The whole room from the same spots | 3 to 5. Tile, fixtures, hardware |
| Panel or EV charger | 1 to 2. The old panel or the empty wall | 2 to 3. The new panel, the charger mounted | 1 to 2. Labeled breakers, the conduit run |
| Heat pump or furnace | 1 to 2. The old unit | 2 to 3. The new unit inside and out | 1 to 2. The line set, the thermostat |
| Patio, wall, or yard | 2 to 3. The yard from a corner | 3 to 5. The same corners | 2 to 3. Joints, edges, drainage |
| Concrete | 1 to 2. The old slab or bare ground | 2 to 4. The finished pour | 2 to 3. Forms and rebar during, the finish |
Add a few during photos on jobs where the best work gets covered up, like the underlayment before the shingles, the rebar before the pour, or the insulation before the drywall. Homeowners never see that part, and a photo of it shows how you build.
Where the photos go
On a Site with Tools, job photos become project pages, labeled by job and town, and each pair of before and after photos can become a before and after slider a homeowner drags with a thumb. On every site I build, the best ones go on the town page and the service page for that job. DWV Construction, a Portland remodeler, has a site built around 129 of its own project photos.
Text the set to me with the town and the job. Photos sent before launch go into the build. After launch, a Site with Tools has 60 days of updates. After that, Care covers small changes, or a change is quoted flat before I make it. Post a few from every job on your Google profile too. The Google Business Profile checklist covers where they go there. If you want to see how finished sites use job photos, the portfolio has the live builds.
