A photograph of a defect is worth exactly as much as your ability to prove four things about it: when it was taken, where it was taken, who took it, and that nobody changed it afterward. Strip those away and you don't have evidence — you have a picture that a determined opponent can wave off as "taken anywhere, anytime, by anyone."
Most site photos have all four facts and throw them away. Here's how we keep them.
The four facts a defect photo has to carry
When you capture a defect photo in IssuesId, the device knows more than the image. We capture and bind:
- →Timestamp — the moment of capture, from the device clock, recorded at write time rather than upload time.
- →Location — GPS latitude and longitude, plus compass heading, so the photo records not just where the photographer stood but which way they were facing.
- →Device and user identity — which authenticated user, on which registered device, produced the capture.
- →Integrity — a record that the original bytes are unchanged since capture.
None of this is visible in the photo. All of it is attached to the photo, travels with it through sync, and appears in the report.
Why heading matters more than you'd think
GPS alone places the photographer at a point. In a building, a point isn't enough — the same spot on level 4 looks into two apartments and a corridor. Heading disambiguates. "Standing here, facing 270°" resolves to one wall, one defect, one place you can return to and re-photograph the same view for the close-out shot.
The before-and-after pair is the most persuasive thing in a dispute, and it's only possible if both photos can be proven to look at the same wall from the same place.
Annotations never touch the original
This is the rule that makes the whole thing hold up: the original photo is immutable.
When a super circles a crack, drops an arrow, or writes "regrout" on an image, none of that is painted into the source file. Annotations are a separate layer, stored as their own data, rendered over the original at display time. The defect view shows the marked-up version because that's what's useful. The evidence chain retains the untouched original because that's what's defensible.
The day someone alleges a photo was doctored, you produce two files: the pristine original and the annotated overlay. The allegation evaporates.
Capture-time, not upload-time
A subtle but important detail: every fact above is recorded the instant the shutter fires, on the device, before any network is involved. This matters because of offline work. A photo captured in a basement at 9:14 a.m. and synced at 4:30 p.m. when the super reaches the site office must carry 9:14 a.m., not 4:30. Upload-time metadata is worthless for evidence — it records when the wifi came back, not when the condition existed.
Because capture is local-first, the timestamp, GPS, and identity are sealed at the moment of truth and simply carried forward when sync happens.
What this is really for
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, nobody asks. The defect is captured, fixed, verified, closed, and the metadata is never examined.
It's the hundredth time that the system is built for — the contested handover, the insurance claim, the tribunal. On that day, the difference between a tool that quietly kept the four facts and one that didn't is the difference between evidence and a story. We chose to keep the facts.