Before-and-after photos are the highest-performing creative in the window treatment trade — and most companies are sitting on a daily supply of them they never capture. Every install is a finished set: a transformed room, a happy homeowner, products your next customer wants to see in a real house rather than a supplier's render. You don't need a photographer; you need a repeatable ten-minute routine your installers actually follow, built around one technical fact — you sell light control, and cameras hate windows. Here's the DIY portfolio photography guide for blinds and shades businesses: the phone settings, the shot list, and the system that turns install days into a marketing library.
The one technical problem, solved first
Point a phone at a bright window and you get either a glowing white rectangle with a silhouetted shade, or a decent window in a cave-dark room. The fixes are simple and non-negotiable:
- Tap to expose on the shade, not the room — on any phone, tap the product and slide exposure down slightly. The room can be a touch moody; the product must read.
- Turn on the room lights and open adjacent-window coverings to narrow the gap between inside and outside brightness. HDR mode (on by default on modern phones) helps; use it.
- Shoot the money shots at the bright-balance hours — mid-morning or mid-afternoon, not high noon with sun blasting the glass. For west windows, late-day 'shade taming the glare' is itself a sales photo: shoot the problem being solved.
- Never use flash — it flattens texture, bounces off hardware, and makes fabric look like plastic.
The ten-minute shot list (laminate this for the crew)
- Before — from the doorway, phone level, before anything comes down. Mark your feet mentally: the after gets shot from the same spot. Matching before/afters are worth five of anything else.
- After, wide — same doorway, same height, room lights on, shade at its best position (usually two-thirds down for rollers and zebras: shows product and function).
- After, mid — one wall of windows straight-on, verticals actually vertical (the gridlines setting in the camera app is the installer's friend).
- Detail — one close shot per install: the fabric texture, the cassette, the shutter louvers, the cordless lift. This is the shot that makes Houzz and your site look professional.
- Function — top-down-bottom-up positioned, zebra bands aligned, blackout doing its dramatic thing (shoot the dark room from inside with the door open — the darkness IS the product).
- Motion, if motorized — 15 seconds of shades gliding on command. Motorization demos itself on video better than any other product you sell; one clip per motorized install, always.
Staging: the ninety seconds that separate amateur from pro
Before shooting: raise every covering in frame to the same height (mismatched levels are the unmade bed of window photography), straighten wands and align slats, clear the sill and the two feet of floor under the window, wipe obvious handprints off the glass, and pocket the installer's drill and packaging. If the homeowner's furniture helps the shot, include it — real rooms outperform empty ones — but ask before moving anything. Ninety seconds, every time, and your feed stops looking like job-site documentation and starts looking like a portfolio.
Consent, made routine
Ask every customer at booking or completion: 'We photograph our installs for our portfolio — never your address or anything personal, just the windows. OK with you?' Most say yes, a line in your work order records it, and the ones who decline get respected without awkwardness. Never post exteriors that identify a home, visible family photos, or anything with the customer's name in frame. The trade runs on trust about strangers-in-my-house; your photo practices should visibly deserve it.
The system: from camera roll to marketing library
Photos that stay on an installer's phone are marketing that didn't happen. The lightweight system: a shared album or drive folder per month, installers dump shots same-day (make it a completion-checklist item alongside the review ask), and once a week someone — owner, office manager, whoever runs marketing — spends twenty minutes picking the keepers and tagging them by product and room type. That tagged library is what feeds everything: Google Business Profile uploads (real install photos in local results are a differentiator most competitors still don't have), the website gallery organized by product, Houzz project sets with material-named captions, and the weekly reel from the best motion clip. One install day can feed four channels for a week.
Deploying what you shot
- Google Business Profile: two or three fresh install photos a week, minimum. This is the highest-leverage destination and the most neglected.
- Website galleries: organized by product (rollers, shutters, motorized) because that's how shoppers browse; each photo doing double duty on the relevant product page.
- Houzz: full project sets, captions naming the actual products and materials — search inside Houzz runs on those words.
- Social: before/after pairs and motion clips, captioned with the benefit and your city. The algorithmic reach is a bonus; the real value is the prospect who checks your feed before booking the consultation and finds proof of craft.
- The consultation itself: a curated best-of album on the consultant's tablet answers 'what would this look like in a real house?' — the question every sample book fails.
What this replaces (and what it's worth)
Supplier stock photography makes every dealer's site look identical — same renders, same fake living rooms — and homeowners have learned to scroll past it. A library of your own installs, in local homes, with your crew's work visible in the details, is the cheapest differentiation available in this trade: it costs ten minutes per install and a laminated card. Six months of the routine and you'll have hundreds of authentic photos working across every channel — and the next time a prospect asks 'have you done a house like ours?', the answer is a swipe, not a promise.