10 Tips for better construction photography

08 - Organize early and often

Organizing digital construction photos is a challenge. Most people agree labeling and organizing photos is a good idea but few people find the time to do it on a consistent basis. As I pointed out in a previous column, if you want to photograph every interior wall and ceiling of a 1000 square foot remodel you need to take about 200 pictures with a digital camera.  The most common way of organizing digital photos is to put them in a file folder labeled with the date they were taken.  If you take 200 pictures on a single day and put them in a single folder you will need to search a lot of images to find the one you are looking for.  If you take the time to separate the pictures of each room into different folders  (e.g. folders named Office, Bedroom#4, Bath#4, etc.) you will make it much easier to find an image  when you need it later.  

A more natural way to organize construction images is to display them graphically along with their relation to the floor plan. A simple approach is to write the name of the digital photo (for example CX4N0001.JPG) on a copy of the blue print near where the photo was taken.  This approach makes it easy to find the images you need but be sure that the blueprint and the photos don’t get separated in the future or the documentation will become meaningless.

The near-by screen shot shows Imaging Perspective’s version of the photo-on-blueprint approach to organizing images.  Photographs are electronically keyed to the floor plan and available on the web.  When the user mouses over a room the images of that room appear on the screen along with an indicator that shows where each image was taken.  The screen shot shows two images of the South wall of Bedroom#4 taken at different times.  The larger image shows the wall before sheet rock was installed.  The smaller image shows the same wall after sheet rock. The cursor in the smaller image points to a spot where an outlet was covered over by the sheet rockers.

Better organization of construction photos can help you work in new ways, like finding covered outlets from your office by viewing photos on the web.

Ken VanBree is the owner of Imaging Perspective, a Bay Area firm that specializes in as-built construction photography.  Questions or comments are welcome: ken@imagingperspective.com