Using a Photo of a Customer's House

Why this needs deciding

A photograph of completed work is frequently a photograph of somebody's home.

Publishing it tells anybody who recognises the property that work was done there, what kind, and roughly what it cost.

Which is information the owner may not want circulating, for reasons ranging from privacy to security to simply not wanting their kitchen discussed.

Most customers say yes when they are asked, and asking is what turns a potential problem into a straightforward permission on the record.

What makes a property identifiable

• The street view or the front of the house.
• House numbers on a door or a bin.
• Vehicle number plates on a driveway.
• A distinctive feature a neighbour would recognise.
• Location data embedded in the image file.
• Naming the street in the caption.

The fifth catches people out. Phones record the location a photograph was taken, and that data travels with the file unless removed, which some platforms do and some do not.

Asking properly

At the time, on site, in one sentence.

Asking while you are there, having just finished good work, produces a far better response than an email a fortnight later.

Say what it is for: our website and occasionally social media.

Ask specifically about the outside if you intend to use it, since people frequently agree to interior shots and not exterior ones.

And record the answer somewhere attached to the job, because in two years nobody will remember and the photograph will be unusable.

A worked example

A business with a large library of job photographs and no record of permissions.

When building a new website they could not tell which images they were entitled to publish.

Contacting past customers retrospectively produced a low response rate, since people had moved, changed numbers, or simply did not reply.

They could use perhaps a third of what they had.

From then on the job sheet carried a line for photograph permission, ticked or not at the end of every job.

Fifteen seconds per job, and the library became usable rather than uncertain.

Putting it in the paperwork

Better than asking each time, and it removes the awkwardness.

A line in the quote or terms saying you may photograph completed work for your own promotion, with an easy way to decline.

Which means the default is agreed at the start rather than negotiated at the end.

Still worth mentioning it on the day, since a line in paperwork somebody skimmed is not the same as a person having agreed.

And the wording is worth getting checked, since consent language has requirements that vary and a poorly drafted clause is worth less than a verbal yes.

People in photographs

A separate question with a stricter answer.

Customers, their children, their neighbours, and anybody passing should not be identifiable in a published photograph without their agreement.

Children particularly, where the answer should simply be not to publish rather than to seek permission.

Your own team is different, and worth having agreed once rather than assumed, since an employee may not want their photograph on a website.

The practical rule is composing the shot so that nobody is in frame at all, which removes the question entirely and is easy enough to do.

Location data in the file

The detail most likely to be overlooked, since it is invisible.

A photograph taken on a phone typically records where it was taken, and that information travels inside the file.

Which means publishing an interior photograph with no identifying features can still disclose the address to anybody who inspects the file.

Some platforms strip this automatically on upload and some do not, and a file uploaded directly to your own website generally keeps it.

Removing it is straightforward: most image tools have an option, and resizing a photograph for the web frequently removes it as a side effect.

Worth checking once on your own site rather than assuming your process handles it.

The counter-case

Where permission is not required.

Commercial premises, generally, where a business's frontage is a public-facing thing and the considerations are different, though asking remains good practice and the client may have their own rules.

Work photographed in a way that identifies nothing: a close detail, a component, a technique.

And your own property or premises.

Even so, a commercial client may have confidentiality requirements of their own, which is worth asking about rather than assuming a business will not mind.

What to do with older photographs

The practical question for a business starting this now.

An existing library with no permission record is not unusable, and it needs a judgement rather than a rule.

Interior detail shots identifying nothing are low risk. Exterior shots showing a recognisable house are not.

Where an image is genuinely valuable and the customer is still contactable, asking retrospectively is worth the message.

Where they are not contactable, the safer position is using only what identifies nothing, which is usually enough for a portfolio.

When somebody changes their mind

Worth handling well, since it happens occasionally and the response matters.

Somebody who agreed and later asks for a photograph to be removed should have it removed, promptly, without argument.

Whatever the paperwork says, refusing produces a complaint, a review, and a story that costs more than the photograph was worth.

Remove it from the site and from any social posts, and confirm that you have.

Caching and reposting means it may persist elsewhere, and saying so honestly is better than promising a completeness you cannot deliver.

The routine

1. Ask on the day, having just finished.
2. Ask separately about exterior shots.
3. Record the answer on the job sheet.
4. Keep house numbers and plates out of frame.
5. Compose so nobody is identifiable.
6. Remove anything somebody later objects to.

The third is the one that makes a photograph library genuinely worth having, since an image you cannot prove you are entitled to publish is one you will not risk publishing.

None of this is onerous once it is a habit, and it turns a library of photographs from something uncertain into something you can actually publish.

The copyright side of images is covered in using a photo you did not take.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.