Getting large site videos and photos back from contractors reliably takes three things:
- A way to move big video files (most email systems cap attachments at 25MB or less, and a single walkthrough video is several times that).
- A standing brief that tells the contractor what to capture.
- A place for the files to land that is not a folder somebody has to sort.
Most firms have none of the three, which is why the evidence arrives late, compressed, or lost on a drive.
Where the usual methods fail
Site evidence is now mostly video, and video does not fit through email. A 30-second iPhone video shot at 4K runs around 90MB, several times past a 25MB attachment cap, and a real walkthrough is minutes long, not seconds. That walkthrough is often the only thing that shows what the still images cannot. So the file goes by text message, which compresses it into uselessness, or a transfer service with an expiring link, or a shared drive folder somebody has to remember to check. The moment it leaves email it is no longer attached to anything: somebody has to fetch it, name it, work out which visit it belongs to, and put it in front of whoever is writing the report. That work is invisible and it happens on every job, so it is worth choosing the mechanism deliberately.
The generic fixes, and what they leave undone
Account-free intake exists in tools most firms already pay for. Dropbox and Google Drive both offer file-request links: you send a link, the contractor uploads without an account, and the files land in a folder you chose. That alone beats email for size and beats texting for quality, and if you adopt nothing else, adopt that. A shared project folder with a naming convention is the older version and still better than an inbox.
What none of them do is connect the files to the work. The uploads land in a folder, not in the report that needs them, so the fetch-name-sort step survives, and an expired link or a wrong folder still loses a day. The gap between a folder and a report queue is exactly the part a purpose-built intake closes, which is where we come in at the end. Either way, the bigger improvement is free and comes first.
Write the brief once
"Send me some photos of the work" produces photographs framed the way a contractor frames things, which is often not what the report needs. The fix costs one sentence of thought per job: say what the report has to conclude and what evidence would let it. A standing six-line brief, reused across jobs, gets a contributor closer on the first attempt than a general request gets them on the third. A workable shape:
- What the report has to conclude this period.
- The specific locations or elements to capture (name the joint, the penetration, the section of slab).
- Wide shot first, then close-up, for each location.
- Narrate while filming: what you are doing, what changed since yesterday.
- Anything that looked different, leaked, moved, or was replaced.
- Send by [the link], today, before you leave site.
Adapt it per report type and reuse it. It is the cheapest improvement available in this whole area and it requires buying nothing.
Where Tenera fits: the intake built into the report
Tenera Reports is built to be the easiest possible way to transfer site files, with what we call a Remote Link. The engineer generates the link in one click and sends it, and the contributor's side could not be simpler: a general contractor, a building operator, or a site supervisor opens it and uploads video, images, and voice memos straight from their phone, with no app to install and no account to sign in to. Contributors can add files to one intake and see nothing else: the report, the network, and the filing system stay the engineer's. The uploads land directly in the engineer's draft review table, the queue they already work through when they sit down to write, and the engineer's narration over that evidence becomes the report's substance. The model cannot assert a finding the engineer never called.
On a project needing daily progress evidence, the designed pattern is: link goes to the contractor at six in the morning, uploads arrive through the day against the brief, and by five the evidence is in the review table for the engineer to narrate and draft from. We describe that as a method rather than a case study; it is how the workflow is built to run, not a deployment we have watched end to end.
Want the easiest way to share site files?
Send one Remote Link and the evidence shows up full size, in the right report, ready to draft from. Start your free trial; the first 15 reports are free, with no time limit. And when the visit itself happens without you, the desk guide shows the whole remote workflow, from someone else's phone on site to a client-ready report at your desk.