How photo analysis works

Photo analysis is where BidCraft earns its keep. You upload pictures of a bathroom, hit a button, and a minute or two later you've got dimensions, fixture counts, material identification, condition grades for every surface, and a populated Measurements & Scope section ready to feed into your scope. This article walks you through what's happening under the hood so you know what to expect and how to get the best results.

Running an analysis

Once you've uploaded at least one photo and one note for a room, the Analyze button at the bottom of the room turns terracotta. That's BidCraft telling you it has enough context to do useful work.

[!steps]

1. Make sure the room has at least one photo (or video) and one note.
2. Hit the Analyze button at the bottom of the room.
3. Watch the live status — it shows "queued", then "analyzing" with a rotating series of short plain-language messages (with a little personality) so you know it's actually working through your photos. Total wait is typically a minute or two.
4. Keep working in other parts of the app — the analysis runs in the background.

To run everything at once, hit the Analyze project button at the bottom of the Inputs section — it queues every room and jumps you over to Measurements & Scope, where the results land as they finish.

You won't get stranded on a finished room. If you kick off a per-room analysis and stay put on Inputs, BidCraft moves you to Measurements & Scope on its own the moment the last room finishes — no button-hunting. And once every room is analyzed, the bottom button changes to Continue to Measurements & Scope so there's always a clear next step (no dead "re-analyze" that does nothing).

No photos, just notes? That works too. If you skipped photos and only wrote a voice or text note describing the job, the Analyze project button still shows up. Instead of reading pictures, BidCraft reads your notes — pulling out measurements, fixtures, and scope — and takes you straight to Measurements & Scope. You're never stuck without a way forward just because you didn't snap photos.

What gets extracted

For each room, the AI pulls out four buckets of information:

These four buckets feed everything downstream: your scope of work, your line items, your material takeoff, your pricing.

Numbers you say are kept exactly as you say them. When a voice or text note gives a dimension — "the back wall is 8 by 4" — BidCraft stores that width and height the way you said it instead of flattening it into a single square-footage total, so nothing gets rounded away between the walk and the proposal. And when your note tells walls apart ("back wall runs full height, the two side walls stop at the tub"), the AI creates named per-wall surfaces to match — the split work shows up ready to price instead of one lumped "walls" number.

[!note] When the AI sees a bathtub or alcove tub, it defaults the tiled wall area to a 3-wall surround (the back wall plus the two end walls, to roughly 60–72" above the tub) rather than tiling all four room walls floor-to-ceiling. If your job actually tiles every wall full height, say so in a note ("full wall tile, all four walls") and the AI will follow your lead.

How it handles multiple photos of the same area

This is where BidCraft gets clever. If you've uploaded several photos of the same shower from different angles, the AI cross-references them. It picks the same dimension from two or three angles and triangulates — same way you'd survey a room with a tape from opposite corners.

[!tip] The two-opposite-corner photo trick is gold. One photo from each end of the room gives BidCraft enough parallax to nail dimensions within an inch or two. Add a tape measure visible in the frame and accuracy goes up further.

When measurements line up across photos, the AI marks them as corroborated — its highest-trust category. When they only show up in one photo with no cross-reference, they get tagged as estimated and the confidence drops.

Single-photo analysis

You don't have to upload multiple photos. A single representative photo plus a voice note describing the work works fine — you'll just see slightly lower dimension confidence. BidCraft will still produce a usable scope and pricing; the recommendation is just to grab one more angle next time if you can.

Video narration is captured automatically

If you record a video and call out dimensions as you walk the bathroom ("the back wall is 5 by 8, the tub is 5 foot wide…"), BidCraft transcribes the audio in the background and adds it as a voice note on the project. The dimensions you said get treated as the highest-priority source — they override what the AI would have inferred from the frames. This works for any video you upload to a room, not just dedicated walkthroughs.

If a video has no narration (or the audio couldn't be read), you'll see a small no narration detected marker next to the video — drop a separate voice note in that case so your numbers don't get lost.

Drawings and schedules are read too

Anything you drop into the Plans box on a room card gets read on its own track — a single floor plan, or a builder's full drawing set with a tile schedule beside it. BidCraft works out what each sheet is, reads the ones with tile work on them, and pulls out the room labels, the printed dimensions, and whatever the schedule specified for each surface. A single sheet can cover several rooms at once.

Because the numbers printed on a drawing are measured, BidCraft trusts them above anything it would estimate from a photo. They still rank below your own voice notes and manual corrections, so your spoken or typed measurement is always the final word. Printed labels also tidy up your room names — a labeled area on the plan renames the matching room to that exact label.

Where the drawings and the schedule disagree, BidCraft asks you a short question rather than guessing, and remembers the answer. See Reading drawing sets and tile schedules.

When the room came from your plans. Biddy reads the photos with the sheets' facts already on the table — the tile the schedule named, the heights the elevations printed, the areas it suggested — and treats them as more reliable than anything it estimates from a photo, but less reliable than what you typed. It reads only this room's notes and any job-wide notes, never another room's.

How long it takes

Typically 60 to 150 seconds per room. The math:

That window covers the photo read itself. The project-wide rollup that populates the Measurements card runs in parallel in the background as soon as the photo analysis lands, so the room's status flips to complete without waiting for the rollup. Totals are usually ready by the time you scroll down to look at them; if you're quick on the Draft scope button, BidCraft will finish the rollup on demand. Everything runs in the background, so you can keep editing notes, uploading more photos to other rooms, or even working on a different project entirely while it churns.

[!note] If you reload the page mid-analysis, you'll come back to the same live status. The job keeps running on BidCraft's servers — closing your browser doesn't cancel it.

What "complete" actually means

When the status flips to complete, the room is fully analyzed and its data flows into the Measurements & Scope section — the Measurements card up top, the scope draft below it, and eventually the proposal. A "complete" room also names itself from what the AI saw — a placeholder like "Room 1" becomes "Master Bathroom" or "Kitchen." If you'd already typed a room name by hand, that one stays exactly as you set it.

Underneath the room you'll also see a Structured Analysis section. The full detail block — condition scores, material detection, fixture details, raw observations from each angle — now starts collapsed behind a ▶ Show AI details toggle. A one-line summary stays visible so you know the read completed; click to expand when you want to dig into what BidCraft saw. The key condition and material observations also appear as read-only chips inside each room's section in the Measurements card, so the most useful information is right where you're already working.

Measurements themselves have one home now: the Measurements card in Measurements & Scope, organized by room with a calculator on every area row.

Two more signals now reach the proposal AI. When BidCraft analyzes a room, it rolls the room's worst-case condition score (1–10) and the existing tile details — size, type, pattern, grout condition — into the project synthesis. The proposal AI reads those when drafting your scope and line items. A bathroom with worn 4/10 ceramic in a herringbone pattern gets a different demo and substrate-prep treatment than the same square footage with newer 8/10 large-format porcelain. If you re-run analysis on an existing project, the next proposal draft will pick up the updated signals.

This is the moment to review — not blindly trust. The AI is good but not infallible. Take 30 seconds to glance at the measurements before you move on to the scope draft sitting right below them.

When to re-analyze

You'll want to re-analyze a room if:

• You added new photos or videos
• You recorded a new voice note with measurements
• Conditions on the job changed and you want a fresh read
• The first analysis looked wonky and you want a second pass

Each re-analysis replaces the prior one — you don't accumulate stale data. Manual dimension overrides you typed in are preserved across re-analysis.

Next steps

Once analysis finishes, the next move is to review what came back. Head to Reviewing the AI findings for what to look at first. If something looks off, AI analysis troubleshooting covers the common fixes.