Edited Photos, Generated Images, and Honest Job Documentation

Why this matters

Every phone now ships with one-tap tools that brighten a photo, erase an object or fill in a sky, and AI image tools will produce a finished kitchen or a spotless roof from a sentence. For marketing, most of that is fine. For a photo that records the condition of a job, any of it can be fatal, because the value of a documentation photo is that nobody touched it. When the same camera roll feeds both the website and the job record, sooner or later an edited image lands where an original should be, and the shop discovers it when an insurer, a manufacturer or a customer's attorney asks why its photo does not match theirs.

Two kinds of image, one camera

A documentation photo records a condition at a moment: the rotted decking found under the shingles, the corroded flare fitting before it was replaced, the water line on the drywall, the finished install as it was left. It is used for warranty claims, insurance claims, disputes, permits and your own memory. Its job is to be believed.

A marketing image persuades. It goes on the website, a truck wrap, a social post or an ad. Its job is to make someone call.

The same photo can serve both, but only as two files: the original, which stays exactly as the camera made it, and a copy, which marketing may change. Everything below follows from keeping those two files apart.

Two terms that come up. Metadata is the information a camera writes inside the image file: the date and time it was taken, often the location, the device. Editing apps can rewrite or strip it. An original with intact metadata is far stronger evidence than the same picture without it. Generated image means one produced by an AI tool from a text request or by heavily altering a real photo, rather than captured by a camera at the job.

What documentation photos get: nothing

This is the section that matters most, and its content is a single rule: a documentation photo is never edited, not even a little. No crop, no brightness, no straighten, no "enhance", no filter, no object removal.

People push back on the small ones, so here is why each is excluded:

• Crop. What is outside the frame is part of the record. A cropped photo of a leak can lose the second stain that shows the leak predates your work.
• Brightness or contrast. These change what a stain, a burn mark or a corrosion pattern looks like. An insurer comparing your photo with its adjuster's can reasonably ask which one shows the real color.
• Straighten or perspective correction. It changes apparent slope and gaps, which is exactly what a dispute over a sagging deck or a door gap is about.
• Auto-enhance. Phone enhancement increasingly uses AI that sharpens and fills detail the sensor did not capture. You cannot say what it changed, so you cannot say the photo is true.

The deeper reason is about the whole set, not one picture. If one photo in a job's documentation is shown to have been altered, every photo in the set becomes questionable, including the ones you never touched. The cost of a single brightened image is the credibility of all of them. And the stakes depend on where the photo goes: an altered photo submitted with an insurance claim can fall under your state's insurance fraud statute, whose terms vary by state but generally turn on knowingly submitting misleading material, and an edit you made yourself is hard to call unknowing; and a manufacturer can refuse a warranty claim whose photos it cannot trust.

If someone genuinely needs a brighter view, for instance to see a serial plate in a dark crawlspace, export a copy, label it as an adjusted copy, and keep the original beside it in the record. The original remains the evidence; the copy is a reading aid.

What marketing copies may get

For marketing, the test that works is the one a customer would apply: would someone standing in that yard on that day see what the image shows? Edits that make the picture look like what a person would have seen pass. Edits that change what the work looks like fail.

Generated images in ads

At the federal level, the FTC Act prohibits deceptive advertising, and the FTC judges an ad by the overall impression it leaves on a reasonable customer, not by its fine print. An image on a service page or an ad that a customer would read as "this is a job they did" is a representation that it is your work, whether a camera or a tool made it. A generated image of a finished bathroom on your remodelling page, with no label, makes that representation falsely. A before-and-after pair carries a further implied claim: that the "after" is a typical result.

As of 2026 there is no general federal rule requiring a label on an AI image in an ordinary trade ad; the deception rule applies regardless. Several states have passed AI disclosure laws, mostly aimed at political advertising, and this area is moving fast enough that you should re-check your own state's consumer protection law each year. Ad platforms and listing sites also set their own labeling rules, which can be stricter than either.

The practical rule: use real photos of your own work for anything that shows results. Where a generated or stock image is used for decoration, a header, a seasonal post, label it plainly as an illustration, and never put one next to the words "our work", "recent projects" or a customer's name. This is not legal advice; if a competitor or a regulator raises an image, that conversation belongs with your attorney.

Why a retouched before-and-after can be used against you

A marketing photo of a real job is still a photo of that job. In a dispute, a customer's attorney can ask for every image you hold of the property, and the marketing folder is part of that. If the marketing copy was retouched to remove a defect, it now does three things against you: it shows you knew the defect existed, since someone removed it; it contradicts the customer's own photo; and it invites the question of what else was altered, including your documentation set. A shop with clean, separate originals can answer that question in a minute. A shop whose edited copies drifted into the job record cannot. See related: The Retouched Photo That Became a Dispute.

Once a dispute is reasonably expected, by a demand letter, a lawyer's call or an insurer's denial, the rules tighten further. Altering or deleting relevant images after that point can be treated by courts as destroying evidence, with sanctions that vary by state and court. The first move is to stop editing anything from that job, preserve every original and copy as it stands, and call your attorney with the job record and the list of where its images are stored.

Worked example: one roofing job, fourteen photos

A five-person roofing crew does a partial reroof with a section of decking replaced. The lead takes 14 photos on the job:

• 6 documentation photos before and during tear-off: the existing shingles, two of soft decking, one of rotted fascia, one of the old step flashing, one of the attic underside showing daylight. These are uploaded straight from the phone camera to the job record in the field software, unedited, before the crew leaves the roof.
• 4 progress photos: new decking down, underlayment, flashing installed, ridge vent. Same: straight to the job record.
• 4 final photos from the ground. Straight to the job record as well.

That puts all 14 originals in the job record, which is where the warranty registration and any insurance claim will draw from.

The office then picks 3 for the website: one before, two finals. Each is copied into a separate marketing folder and renamed with "-MKT" on the end. On the copies:

• Exposure lifted on both finals, because the phone underexposed against bright sky. Passes the yard test.
• Neighbor's car cropped out of one final. Passes.
• Dumpster erased from the before. Passes: it was temporary.
• On the second final, the new shingles on the repaired section are visibly a shade lighter than the rest, because the original color lot was no longer available, as the customer had agreed in writing. The office's first instinct was to even out the color. That fails the yard test: a customer standing in the yard sees the mismatch. The copy keeps the mismatch, or a different final is chosen.

Nothing from the marketing folder is ever uploaded back into the job record. The job record has 14 untouched originals; the marketing folder has 3 labeled copies. If the customer later says the mismatch was never explained, the shop has the signed note, an untouched final, and a marketing copy that shows the same thing.

How to check your shop is set up right

• Originals go from the camera to the job record, never through an editing app first. Check one recent job: open a photo's details and confirm the capture date and time are present and match the visit.
• Marketing works only on copies, in a separate place, with a filename marker that says so.
• No file moves from the marketing folder to the job record. Spot-check five jobs a quarter for any file carrying the marker.
• Phone auto-enhance is off on the camera app the crew uses for job photos, or job photos are taken in the field software's own camera.
• Any generated or stock image on the website is labeled, and none sits beside "our work" or a customer's name.

References

• FTC Act, Section 5, and the FTC Policy Statement on Deception (net impression standard)
• Your state's consumer protection and insurance fraud statutes
• See related: The Retouched Photo That Became a Dispute
• See related: Writing Service Pages With AI That Are Still Yours
• See related: Telling Customers When AI Is Involved