The homeowner sent bad photos for a quote, so what can you still do with them

Nobody writes this from your side of it

Search this and page one does not have an answer on it. There is a cleaning company post about requesting photos without losing leads, a countertop guide written for the homeowner telling her what to send, a government tip sheet on getting quotes, a couple of Wikipedia articles that have nothing to do with anything, and a thread about a warranty argument.

So the two adjacent pages that exist are both about asking properly, and both are written from the other chair. There is nothing for the contractor who already asked, already got the photos, and is now sitting in his truck at seven in the evening looking at a set he cannot price.

Six ways a photo comes back useless

Almost every bad set fails in one of these ways, and the failure tells you what to ask for next.

• Too close. A tap, a tile, a corner of the vanity. No room, no context, no idea which wall you are looking at.
• Too dark. Shot at night with the overhead on, so the whole wall is one grey shape and you cannot read the condition of anything.
• The wrong wall. Three shots of the pretty side and nothing of the plumbing wall, which is the only wall that matters.
• Shot from the doorway only. One photo of the whole room from the one place she could stand, which hides everything under and behind.
• Doors and cabinets closed. No sink base, no panel, no idea what is under there.
• Nothing for scale and no sizes. A perfectly clear photograph of a room that could be seven feet wide or eleven.

The message that gets the rest

The instinct is to list everything she did wrong. Do not. Thank her, be specific, name the exact shots, and say what each one is for. Three or four named photographs come back far more reliably than a general ask to send better pictures, because now it is an errand instead of a judgement.

Something like this, with your own words in it. Thanks, that helps. Two more and I can get you a real number. One from the doorway of the whole bathroom so I can see the layout, and one of the wall the sink is on from as far back as you can get. If you can open the cabinet under the sink and shoot that as well, I will know what the plumbing is doing.

Then stop asking. If the second round comes back just as bad, that is not a photography problem and more texts will not solve it. Either the job is worth a drive or it is not, and you now have enough to decide which.

Photographs were never going to give you the sizes

This is the part worth being blunt about, because there are tools being sold on the opposite claim. A photograph does not tell you how wide the room is. It shows condition, materials, layout, obstacles and what is in the way. Every one of those is useful. None of them is a dimension.

So a photo set, however good, gets you to a range and not to a price. The sizes have to come from somewhere else. Either somebody with a sensor measures the room, or somebody measures it and types the figures in, or you drive out with a tape.

That is the whole reason the link exists. On a recent iPhone Pro the phone measures the room with LiDAR while she walks it, so the dimensions come off a sensor rather than off her tape. On any other phone it falls back to photographs plus room sizes she types in, which you treat as typed sizes. Either way the capture tells her what to point at as she goes, and the photos upload one at a time as she takes them, so you can see what is missing while she is still standing in the room instead of three hours later.