What to photograph for your Google profile

What we are not going to tell you

We are not going to tell you photos move you up the map. Nobody has shown that, so we won’t say it.

Here is what photos plainly do. A customer has 3 listings open and not much patience. One has a stock image of a spanner and a logo squashed into a square. One has 14 photos of real jobs in streets that look like his street. He is deciding between them on that, because it is the only evidence in front of him. Photos are not how you get found. They are a large part of what happens next.

The shot list, in the order the job happens

12 shots. None of them need a second person, a tripod, or more than about 6 minutes across the whole day.

Before you touch anything

1. The ute or van at the kerb. Whole vehicle in frame, shot from the front corner so the signage on the side and the back both read. Not a close-up of the door decal.
2. The before shot. Stand where the problem is plainly visible, and put your feet somewhere you can find again. Take it before you move a single thing. A before shot is easy to lose once the job has started.

While you are working

1. Hands on the work. Over your own shoulder or from the side, close enough to see what is being done. It is the most convincing one on the list.
2. The wide version of the same moment. Two steps back, so a person can see what the room or the roof actually is. Close-ups on their own leave a viewer with no idea of scale.
3. The bit nobody sees when it is finished. Inside the wall, under the floor, behind the panel. It is the part you are actually being paid for.
4. The gear on the drop sheet. Tools laid out, not scattered. It reads as a person who works tidily, which is exactly what the customer is worried about.

Before you leave

1. The after shot, from the spot you stood in for the before. Same distance, same height. A matched pair beats a good photo every time, and the only way to get one is to have thought about it 4 hours earlier.
2. The finish, close enough to read. The labelled board, the sealed penetration, the neat conduit run, the grout line. Detail is what a tradie looking at your work sees, and customers copy that judgement.
3. The site left clean. Floor swept, sheet up, no offcuts. Photograph the absence of mess.
4. The certificate or the job card. Compliance paperwork on the bench with the customer’s details out of frame or covered. Straight, in focus, taken from directly above.

Back at the shed, once

1. You, or the crew, standing still. Outdoors, shade rather than direct sun, taken by somebody else at chest height. Work clothes, no posing. One photo of the actual people beats any amount of stock.
2. The logo on a plain background. This is the one file that is allowed to be a PNG, because a logo needs a genuinely transparent background to sit on anything else without a white box around it.

5 things about holding the phone

• Wipe the lens on your shirt first. Every trade phone has a film of something on it and it is why your photos look foggy.
• Shoot landscape for the work, portrait for the vehicle and the people. Both crops get used in different places, so give yourself room around the subject rather than filling the frame.
• Turn a light on rather than using the flash. A flash into a switchboard or a bathroom mirror gives you a white blob where the detail was.
• Do not zoom. Walk closer. Zoom on a phone throws away the detail you are trying to show.
• No filters, and do not burn your phone number across the top. Google’s photo rules are for photos, not adverts.

How the files get saved

This is the standard we apply to every image on every build, and it applies to profile photos the same way.

• Maximum 1800px on the long edge. Your phone shoots at roughly 4,000px. Nothing displays it at that size, so you are carrying detail nobody will ever see.
• Saved as JPEG. That is what JPEG is for.
• PNG only for genuine transparency. In practice that is your logo and almost nothing else. A photo saved as a PNG is a much larger file for no visible gain.
• If a file is heavier than roughly 5MB, resize it before it goes anywhere near the profile.

Resizing takes seconds and needs nothing you have to buy. On a Mac, open the photo in Preview, then Tools, then Adjust Size, and set the width to 1800. On Windows, open it in Photos, hit the three dots and choose Resize. On the phone itself, the share sheet on most handsets offers a smaller size when you email or message an image, and mailing yourself the medium version is a perfectly legitimate way to do this.

Rename the files while you are there — something like hotwater-changeover-riverton.jpg rather than IMG_4471.jpg. We have no evidence that a file name does anything at all on a Google profile and we are not claiming it does. Do it because in 8 months you will want to find that photo again, and you will never find IMG_4471.

The photos that make a good operator look like a bad one

• Stock photos. A customer recognises them, and it costs you more trust than an ordinary phone photo ever would.
• A screenshot of your logo, complete with the white box, sitting sideways.
• A job shot in the dark with the phone torch, out of focus, taken at knock-off.
• A team photo with somebody in it who left 3 years ago.
• Anything showing a customer’s house number, their number plate, their kids, or their front door lock.
• Somebody else’s finished work off the internet. The bloke whose photo it is can notice.
• 40 photos of the same install uploaded in one go, so the profile shows a wall of near-identical images and nothing else.

Ask before you photograph inside someone’s house

It costs you one sentence: “Do you mind if I grab a couple of photos of the finished job for our website? No addresses, nothing identifying.” The ones who say no would have been genuinely annoyed to find their laundry on Google, and you have just avoided that.

Ask on the way in, not on the way out, so you can still take the before shot. Commercial sites are stricter, and some have a blanket no-camera rule, so check with the supervisor rather than assuming.

How often, and what to do with the rest

3 to 5 photos off every second job is plenty. Add them in small batches rather than dumping 60 at once. We cannot tell you that a steady trickle does anything for how you rank, because we do not know. What we can tell you is that a profile whose newest photo is from 4 years ago is answering a question the customer did not ask.

The photos that miss the profile are not wasted. Matched pairs are the raw material for pages that describe real jobs in real suburbs, which runs on the same 15 minutes of detail a job story needs. Keep a folder per job, named by suburb, and that work is half done already.

If you only do one thing off this page, do the pair. Before, from a spot you can find again, and after from the same spot. One job, 2 photos, about 40 seconds all up.