What is 360° photo documentation, and why use it on a construction site?

The problem it actually solves

Site photography works, and it is the cheapest contemporaneous record a project generates. But it carries a hidden assumption: that somebody standing on site, on the day, correctly guessed which of the things in front of them would be argued about two years later.

That guess is usually wrong, and it is wrong in a specific way — people photograph what is going well, what is nearly finished, and what they have been asked to evidence. The bracket detail nobody looked at is not in the archive, because nobody looked at it.

A 360° capture does not require the guess. It records the room.

Location as the index

The second advantage is filing. Site information is created by place — something happened in a room — and then filed by document type: the snag in the snag register, the query in the RFI log, the image in a folder named by date.

Pinning captures to the floor plan inverts that. The plan is the index and the location is the key, so everything that ever happened at a grid reference is reached from the grid reference. That is the difference between a record you can interrogate and one you can only confirm.

What makes it worth anything

Two disciplines, and neither is about hardware. A consumer 360° camera is sufficient.

• Consistent capture points. Two captures of one location can only be compared honestly if the viewpoint did not move. Captures taken from wherever somebody happened to be standing are a gallery, not a record.
• A cadence, held. The value is in the sequence, and a sequence with a gap in it has the gap exactly where the argument will be. Weekly or monthly are the common conventions; the rhythm matters more than which one you pick.
• And the same evidence standards as any other image — timestamp, location, author, and a link to the record it proves. That doctrine is set out in full on the photos module, and it applies here unchanged.