What makes a before-and-after worth having

A before-and-after pair does one job: it shows the same spot, twice, with the work done in between. That only works if both photographs are taken from close to the same position, at a similar distance, with the room or wall filling the frame in roughly the same way. Change the angle between the two shots and the reader has to take your word for what happened.

Same position, same distance

Stand in the same spot for both photographs where you can. A bathroom retiled and photographed from the doorway looks different, and a customer trying to judge the standard of the work ends up comparing two different views. If the before was taken from the doorway, the after should be taken from the doorway too.

Light that shows the work

A flash photograph taken in the evening set against a photograph taken in daylight will make almost any job look worse than it was, because the two images are not really comparable. Where possible, take both photographs in similar light: daylight for daylight, or the same lamp or flash setting used for each.

What ruins a pair

  • Blurred or badly framed shots, taken quickly and never checked before moving on to the next job
  • A before photograph that shows a different wall, fitting or angle from the after
  • Tools, packaging or offcuts left in the frame, which pull attention away from the work itself
  • Only one photograph taken. Without the before, the after is just a picture of a finished job, and it loses the comparison that made it worth taking in the first place

None of this calls for anything beyond the phone already in your pocket. It calls for the habit of taking the first photograph before the job starts, and taking the second from roughly the same spot once it's finished.

Before the shot is taken

What to check before a job photograph goes on the site

A job photograph is only worth having if it holds up to a second look. These are the checks worth running before it goes anywhere near the site.

  • Same spot, before and after

    A before-and-after pair only shows the change if the camera stood in the same place for both, so the eye reads the work and not a different angle.

  • Enough light to see what was done

    A dim hallway or a shot taken against a window turns a finished job into a photograph nobody can make sense of.

  • Nothing that names the address

    Post on a table, a parcel label, a door number or a number plate in the driveway identifies the property even when no face is in the shot.

  • No one in the background who did not agree to be there

    A family member crossing the hallway, or a neighbour visible through a window, is someone who has not said yes to appearing on the site.

  • Permission asked before the phone comes out

    Asking afterwards puts the customer in the position of objecting to something that already exists.

  • The agreement kept somewhere, even briefly

    A text message or a line on the invoice saying the customer is happy for the photographs to be used is enough to settle the question if it comes up again later.

  • Where a customer does appear, that it was their choice

    If a customer photograph does show their face, being identifiable is a decision for them to make.

This covers what to check about the photograph itself. Getting it from the phone onto the site is a separate question, covered further down the page.

Moving the photographs from your phone onto the site

The photographs themselves are the easy part. Most trade businesses have plenty on a phone already, taken as the job went along without much thought for where they would end up. The part that stalls is the transfer: getting a set of pictures off a phone and into a form that can be placed on a page, without turning a five-minute task into an afternoon.

How to send them

Messaging apps compress photographs automatically to keep file sizes down for sending, which means a picture sent through WhatsApp arrives smaller and less sharp than the original taken on the phone. Emailing the photographs to yourself, or uploading them to a shared folder (Google Drive, Dropbox, or similar), keeps them at full quality. That matters more for a before-and-after pair than for a single shot, because differences in detail are the point being shown.

Keeping pairs together

A before photograph is only useful next to its after photograph, so the two need to travel as a pair. Naming them consistently as they are taken (the address, or the job, followed by 'before' and 'after') means nobody has to work out later which picture belongs with which.

Sending as a batch

One folder covering several completed jobs is easier to work with than photographs sent one at a time as each job finishes, because it means going through the same steps once rather than repeatedly. There is no need to sort or edit anything before sending: cropping, ordering and sizing for the page are separate from the job of getting the pictures across in the first place.