Getting found
Everybody’s fence looks good finished. Photograph the hole.
The short answer
A finished job proves nothing, because every finished job looks finished. The photos that sell are of the parts nobody can see afterwards — the footing, the base, the joint — and they exist for about an hour.
Have a look at your own gallery, or the one on the site you paid for. Finished fences, mostly. Straight on, sunny day, nobody in shot. Twelve of them, and after the third one a visitor has stopped looking.
It is not that the photographs are bad. It is that they are interchangeable with every other fencing gallery on the internet, including the ones belonging to people who do the job badly.
A finished job is the least persuasive photo you own
Think about what a finished fence actually proves. That there is a fence. That it was upright on the day. It does not show how deep the posts went, whether the timber is treated where it matters, or whether it will still be straight in three winters.
Everything a customer is actually worried about is invisible by the time the job looks good. Which is why the photographs worth having are all taken while it still looks like a mess.
The test, applied to a camera roll
The same filter that decides what belongs in a quote decides what belongs in a gallery: could the firm that does this badly show me the same picture? If yes, the picture is not evidence, it is decoration.
| The photograph | What a customer can conclude from it | Could a careless firm show it? |
|---|---|---|
| Finished fence, straight on, good light | There is a fence. It was up on the day it was photographed. | Yes, always. |
| The hole, with a tape measure standing in it | This person digs to the depth they say they dig to. | Only if they actually dug it. |
| The same view before anything started | This is what changed. Now the finished shot means something. | Only if they remembered, and most do not. |
| Concrete going in around a post | The post is set, not knocked in and backfilled with soil. | Only if they set it. |
| Van, crew, logo, tidy site at the end of day one | These are real people who clean up as they go. | Partly. The tidy site is harder to fake than the van. |
The window is about an hour wide
This is the part that makes it a habit problem rather than a photography problem. The shots that carry the argument can only be taken during a short stretch of the job, and once the concrete is in they are gone for good.
The before shot has the same problem in reverse. You arrive, you are keen to get going, and the one photograph that would have made every later one mean something never gets taken. Then the transformation you actually sold is unprovable.
Then stop — six is the whole list, and a seventh angle of the same fence adds nothing. Rename them the same evening with the street and the month. A folder of four thousand files called IMG_2274 is the same as having taken no photographs at all.
What actually costs you a job
Some photographs are worse than none, and they are usually put up with good intentions — more looks like more effort. It reads as the opposite.
| What gets published | Why it costs you |
|---|---|
| A page of near-identical finished shots | The two or three good ones become invisible. A visitor who scrolls past everything has learned nothing and remembers nothing. |
| Somebody’s house number, number plate or child in frame | You have published a stranger’s home on the internet without asking. It also reads as careless, which is the exact opposite of what the gallery is for. |
| A stock photograph among your own | One reverse image search and everything else on the page becomes suspect, including the real ones. This is not worth the risk on any page you own. |
| Only afters, no befores | The transformation is the product, and you have deleted the half of it that shows the work. |
| Photos taken from angles that flatter | A gallery that looks arranged reads as arranged. A slightly awkward, honest angle is more convincing than a good one. |
Ask before you publish a photograph of somebody’s house, and keep house numbers and number plates out of the frame while you are shooting. It costs you nothing, it is easier than cropping later, and it removes a conversation you do not want to be having.
Four photographs beat forty
The gallery is not an archive. Its job is to answer one question — does this person do the buried part properly — and it answers it faster with four photographs of one job in sequence than with forty finished fences from forty jobs.
The four are the before, the hole with the tape, the fixing going in, and the after from the same spot. The other two from the list — the tidy site and whatever gets covered up — are worth having, but those four are the sequence.
If you have got that sequence for three jobs, you have got more than almost anybody in your trade, and they will do more work than a gallery ten times the size.
Where they earn their keep
Having taken them, most people put them in one place: a gallery page on their own website, which is the last thing a visitor reaches and the first thing they skip. The same six photographs are worth considerably more in two other places, and one of those is seen before anybody clicks anything.
| Where it goes | Why there | Which of the six |
|---|---|---|
| Your Google Business Profile | This is the one that is looked at before your site exists to them — in the results, next to your name and your hours. A profile with recent, real photographs of local work reads as a business that is currently working. | The before and after pair, and the tidy site. |
| The page for that exact service | Somebody who searched for a gate repair should land on gate repairs and see a gate repair. A general gallery makes them do the sorting, and they will not. | The whole sequence for one job of that type. |
| The quote itself | Two photographs at the end of a quote, of the buried part of a job like theirs, do what no sentence in the quote can do. | The hole with the tape, and the fixing going in. |
And add them as you go rather than in one afternoon. Six photos a month, month after month, says something a single upload of seventy cannot: that the business is working now. A profile whose newest picture is from two summers ago says the opposite, quietly, to everybody who looks.
You will find a figure quoted all over the internet about how many more calls a profile with a hundred photographs gets. We are not going to repeat it, because we cannot see how it was measured and neither can the sites repeating it. The argument above stands on what a photograph shows a person, which you can check yourself by looking at a rival’s profile and asking what you learned.
Two practical things, since they cost nothing. Bring the file down to about twelve hundred pixels wide before uploading — a photo straight off a modern phone is several times larger than anything needs to be, and on a bad signal that is the difference between seen and skipped. And write one line with each: what the work was, and roughly where. Not a keyword list; a sentence.
The short version
- A finished job proves only that a job was finished.
- Photograph what gets buried. That is the part nobody can fake.
- The before shot has to be taken before you unload.
- After has to match before: same spot, same height.
- Six shots a job, on a phone, no editing.
- Rename them the same evening or they are lost.
- Never a stock photo. Never a house number.
- Three complete sequences beat forty finished shots.
- Put them on the Business Profile and the service page, not only in a gallery.
- A few every month beats seventy in one afternoon.
None of this needs a better camera. It needs the phone out at the one moment in the day when getting the phone out is the last thing you feel like doing — which is exactly why so few people have the pictures.