Site photos with a phone: a practical guide

94 percent (Bitkom 2025) of skilled trade businesses run their own website. A website alone is therefore no longer a distinguishing feature but basic equipment. What sets one business apart from the three others offering the same trade in the same town is decided in the first few seconds — and in those seconds nobody reads. People look. Pictures answer faster than any paragraph whether the work here is clean, whether the site is left tidy and whether the jobs shown have anything to do with what is currently pending.

On top of that comes a change on the customer side: 74 percent (Bitkom 2025) of the businesses surveyed find that customers have become more critical. More critical means more comparative. Someone with three websites open side by side does not decide on the more detailed service description but on the impression the pictures leave. A business with twelve honest, well-lit shots of real jobs feels more tangible than one with four purchased images in which strangers in immaculate workwear smile into a camera.

Purchased pictures have a second drawback: they do not show your work. The visitor sees a kitchen nobody in your region builds that way, a roof that has nothing to do with the tiles used here, or an electrical distribution board from another country. People in the trade spot it immediately; everyone else senses it. Your own pictures are therefore not a question of budget but of two minutes per job. How those pictures are later used on the page is covered in our services overview.

The second biggest lever after light costs nothing and takes two minutes: before you press the shutter, walk the frame with your eyes and remove everything that does not belong to the work. The coffee cup on the window sill, the film from the packaging, the open tool case, the phone on the workbench, the crate of drinks in the corner. On site these things are normal. In a picture that sits on your website for months they are the first thing anyone notices.

That includes the background you filter out while working: another firm's van with legible lettering, an advertising sign on the neighbouring facade, the overflowing skip, the cable hanging across the frame. A step to the left, half a metre lower or a turn of thirty degrees solves most of these problems without anything having to be moved. That movement by the photographer is the actual difference between a snapshot and a usable picture.

The before-and-after is the strongest picture form in the trades because it shows the work instead of claiming it. It is also the picture form that most often fails — almost always for the same reason: the two shots are taken from different standpoints. The before picture is grabbed from the doorway in passing, the after picture four weeks later from the opposite corner because the light is better there. Laying the two side by side then compares two different rooms.

The comparison only works if four things stay the same: the standpoint, the height of the camera, the crop and roughly the time of day. Standpoint and height are decisive. Mark the spot where you stand with a chalk cross on the floor or a strip of tape, note the approximate height — chest height, eye height, hip height — and take a screenshot of the before picture that you hold up at the after appointment. Together these three steps take less than a minute.

A second mistake is just as widespread: the before picture is forgotten. Anyone busy taking measurements on the first day is not thinking about photographs, and once the room has been cleared the original state is gone for good. The before shot therefore belongs in the workflow, not in good intentions: it is taken at the measuring appointment, before anything is moved, and it is taken even when it is not yet settled whether the job will happen at all. Two minutes on the off-chance are cheaper than a reference that never comes about.

The default settings of modern phone cameras are usually fine for trade photographs. Three things are still worth doing. First, switch on the grid in the viewfinder: it keeps facades, door frames and joints straight, and crooked lines are the most reliable sign of a picture taken in passing. Second, tap to set exposure: tap the area that should be correctly exposed and pull the slider down if needed, instead of trying to repair a burnt-out window later. Third, use the main camera rather than the ultra-wide setting.

What to avoid: digital zoom, because it does nothing but crop a smaller part of the sensor — stepping closer always gives the better picture. Then automatic beautifying functions and strong colour filters, because they falsify material colours; a customer who finds the joint looking different in reality is rightly irritated. And finally shooting from the hip while walking. Stopping for two seconds, elbows against the body, breathing out, pressing the shutter — that is the difference between sharp and almost sharp.

Besides people, property belonging to others regularly ends up in the frame, in three forms. First the building itself: a before-and-after shows a client's house, and that house is theirs. Second, features that make the location unambiguous — house number, doorbell label with a name, letterbox, the number plate of the private car in the drive. Third, objects belonging to third parties, from another firm's vehicle to scaffolding with someone else's lettering.

Handling this is unspectacular and done in two minutes. Choose the crop so that house number and doorbell label never enter the frame in the first place. Whatever is on the picture anyway is made unrecognisable afterwards — not with a weak blur but with an opaque area that leaves nothing reconstructable. And the location is named at town level, not at street level: "detached house in Söhlde" rather than the full address. That is entirely sufficient for local visibility and stops your reference page from becoming an address directory of your customers.

Between the picture on the phone and the picture on the page there is one step that should not be done by hand. A shot from a current phone camera is several megabytes and considerably larger than any image area on a website needs. Uploaded unchanged, such files make the page noticeably slower on a mobile connection — and that is precisely where most trade enquiries originate. Resizing, converting into a web-ready format and serving several sizes is something a properly built website does by itself.

Two things nonetheless remain manual work, and both cost little. The first is the alternative text: a short description of what can be seen, for people who use the page with a screen reader. "Newly tiled roof surface in anthracite on a detached house" is an alternative text; "image 4" is not. The second is the caption with trade, location and scope. Together they turn a collection of shots into a reference page that explains something even when nobody asks.

Once the pictures exist, the rest is manageable. We build a website for a trade business at a fixed price from 1,490 euros net, a relaunch of an existing site from 2,900 euros net; ongoing website maintenance starts at 49 euros per month, cancellable monthly, with no minimum term. What is included at which level is set out on the pricing page.