What to photograph on a roof, and why it wins the next job

Before is worth more than after

An after photograph shows a roof. Most people cannot tell a good one from a bad one and it does not move them.

A before photograph shows slipped slates, a rotted valley, a chimney with no flashing left on it — and then the after photograph means something. The pair together tells a story a single image cannot, and it is the pair that gets shared, stopped on and remembered.

So the discipline is: photograph it the moment you get up there, before you touch anything. That is the shot everyone forgets and it is the one doing most of the work.

Get the house in

A close-up of a repaired flashing is a technical photograph. It proves competence to another roofer and says nothing to a homeowner.

A photograph with the house visible lets somebody recognise their own home in it. A 1970s semi in a Dublin estate, a bungalow in Mayo, a terrace in Cork city — the customer sees their house type and thinks that roofer does houses like mine.

Shoot from across the road, in landscape, with enough of the building to be recognisable.

Same angle, both times

A before from the scaffold and an after from the garden do not compare. The pair only works if the second shot is taken from roughly where the first one was.

Easiest method: look at the before photograph on your phone before you take the after, and stand in the same place. It takes fifteen seconds and it is the difference between a usable pair and two unrelated pictures.

The shots that are consistently useful

A job produces four or five images worth keeping, not forty. These are the ones that get used.

• —The full house, before, from across the road
• —The actual problem, close, so the damage is legible
• —One shot mid-job with the crew or scaffold — proof it is real
• —The full house, after, from the same spot as the first
• —One detail of the finished work: ridge, valley, flashing

Light and timing

Avoid midday in summer — harsh overhead light flattens a roof and blows out slate. Early morning and late afternoon give the surface texture.

Overcast is genuinely good for roofing photographs. The detail holds and nothing is in deep shadow.

Never shoot into the sun with the house dark against the sky, which is the single most common ruined roofing photograph.

Where they go

Google Business Profile weekly, straight from the phone. The website, grouped by job rather than dumped in a grid. Meta ads, where before-and-after pairs consistently outperform everything else a roofing business can run.

And into quotes. Sending a customer photographs of their own roof with the problem marked is the single most persuasive thing in a roofing sales process, and it costs nothing but the two minutes you already spent up there.