You’ve delivered fourteen jobs and none of them exists online

The kitchen you installed last month, the shop renovation, the setup for that wedding: the photos are on your phone or in a WhatsApp group. When a new client asks what you've done, you forward a pile of loose photos with no date or context. And anyone searching Google for work like yours finds none of it, because as far as the internet is concerned, it doesn't exist.

Here is why photos on your phone don't sell on their own, what to document for each job, how to organize it so a stranger can verify it, what to do about the client's permission, and the ten-minute routine that keeps it going.

Why photos on your phone don't sell on their own

Your delivered work is your best sales argument, but as it stands now it has four problems:

• Nobody finds it. Google doesn't see your gallery or your chats. Someone searching "modular kitchen in Santo Domingo" finds whoever published one on their website.
• Nobody can verify it. A loose photo doesn't say when it was taken, where, how long the job took or what problem you solved. To a stranger, it could be anyone's.
• It gets lost. A new phone or a deleted group and years of work disappear.
• It costs you time every time. Finding the photos, choosing them and sending them to every client who asks.

What to document for each job

You don't need magazine photos. You need each job to tell a complete story that someone who doesn't know you can follow:

• The before. One or two photos of the starting point. It's what makes your change visible.
• The process. Two or three photos during the work. They show you did it.
• The handover. The best photos, in daylight, some horizontal and some vertical.
• The fact sheet. A few concrete details, always the same ones.

An example fact sheet for a kitchen job (the details are illustrative):

The area goes by neighborhood or city, never the address. And the last two rows are the ones that sell the most: a client with a similar problem recognizes themselves in them.

One page per job, not a gallery without context

The temptation is to upload every photo to one big gallery. It works better the other way around: each job gets its own page, with its own address, like yourbusiness.com/work/l-shaped-kitchen-piantini.

• Google can show it. A page with text, a fact sheet and photos can appear when someone searches for that kind of work in that area. A gallery of a hundred photos without text tells it very little.
• You can send the exact link. If someone wants something like the Piantini kitchen, you send that page, not twenty photos.
• The client sees the whole story. The before, the process, the handover and the fact sheet, in order.

The general work page becomes an index: one photo and one line per job, linking to each. If you do several kinds of work, group them by type.

Two details that help the photos show up in Google Images too, according to Google's guidance on images:

• Name the files after what they show: l-kitchen-island-quartz.jpg, not IMG_4532.jpg.
• Write alt text that describes the photo, for people who can't see it and for the search engine.

And before uploading them, shrink them: a photo straight off the phone can weigh several megabytes, and ten of those make the page take forever to open on mobile data. We explain it in heavy photos, slow website.

The client's permission

Before publishing someone's job, ask them. The best moment is the handover, when the client is happy, and the best way is in writing, even on WhatsApp, so there's a record. Something like:

I'm glad you like it. May I publish a few photos of the job on my website, without your name or address?

If they say yes, publish without personal details, unless they want to appear. If they say no, respect it, and you have three alternatives:

• Publish only details: finishes, materials, close-ups where the place can't be recognized.
• Describe it without photos: the fact sheet and the challenge you solved also persuade.
• Keep it to show in person, in a meeting, without publishing it.

Even with permission, check every photo before uploading it: faces, license plates, house numbers or documents in view shouldn't go out without the person knowing.

The ten-minute routine

Documenting becomes a chore if it's left for later. Done in the moment, it takes ten minutes:

1. The day you start a job, create a folder or a chat with yourself named after it and take the before photos.
2. During the job, two or three process photos in that same folder.
3. On handover day, the final photos, the client's permission and the fact sheet filled in on a phone note. That's the ten minutes.
4. Once a month, publish that month's finished jobs on your website.

With that routine, in a year you have a page per job without ever spending a whole afternoon "updating the portfolio".

What you can do this week

1. Pick your five best jobs of the year and find their before, process and handover photos.
2. Ask those five clients for permission with the message above.
3. Write the fact sheet for each one, with the challenge and how you solved it.
4. Upload them to your Google Business Profile now while you prepare the website: they show up there too, as we explain in how to get on Google Maps.
5. Start the routine with the next job you begin.

If your website doesn't have a work section yet, tell us how many jobs you have documented and we'll tell you how to fit it into your corporate website. That's how our own AlegraFest case is built: one page with the whole project, which can be linked to and checked.