With life experience comes knowledge gained of the best remedies for minor aches and pains: what works best for a headache or how to fight your flu symptoms. However, when it comes to something more severe or worrying, you know it’s dangerous to google the symptoms and ask for advice on forums because it’s your health at stake. We’re all aware that a band-aid is useless if a leg is broken; that’s why we call it an emergency and get professional help: time and accuracy are priceless. With construction photo documentation, it’s the same: trusting a professional is the solution.
The Size of a Project
During the mandated lockdowns, many people started DIY projects they’d been planning for a long time, like painting the kitchen or finally finishing the basement. Whether you’re capturing family history or seeing how much time a project takes, the best thing is to take regular photos. But when construction is your profession, you are responsible for more people than just your family. Moreover, the reasons you need to have progress photos at your job site are usually more substantial than for your basement.
Our construction professionals’ experience shows that DIY tools can be considered for projects that do not exceed 10,000 sq feet in size (that’s slighter bigger than half a standard hockey rink). The time required to take photos of such a project, with high-quality equipment and having agreed on the specifics to be captured, is around an hour. It doesn’t seem that time-consuming, but if you add up the time to learn a new device, upload your photos, rename and comment and then share the images, it turns into a demanding extra task on your plate. There are more factors to consider – I always ask myself the ‘3-R’s. Is this required of me? What’s my return? Is this personally or professionally rewarding? If I can’t answer all three, then I need to delegate the task.
Cost and Responsibility
These days, almost everyone has a camera phone, so taking a couple of work-related photos is a simple task. However, you don’t want to use the same device with your personal information on to store your job site pictures that are sensitive in terms of access. Another question to ask yourself is, have you ever lost photos after dropping your phone or letting your toddler play with it? If yes, you know how painful it is to see that your holiday pictures just vanished.
Now imagine the same scenario with photos you’ve been taking on your project site for months. “What about cloud storages?” you ask, but in reality, they pose serious safety and security problems. Files can be accidentally deleted, mixed up, or shared with the wrong people.
Buying a camera might solve a part of the problem, but the challenge of storing, accessing and sharing the images still exists.
Instead of focusing on choosing a camera, figuring out how to use it, ensuring someone on your team is actually getting it done every week, and cutting out priceless time you don’t have to sort, upload and share photos, how about trusting the professionals? 360 photo experts are ready to offer consistency, reliability, security. Reducing your responsibilities gives you back the time in your busy day to focus on the building and doing what you love while ensuring the work gets done.
