Adding photos and videos

Photos and video are how BidCraft sees the job. The more angles you give it, the more accurately it can pull dimensions, spot fixtures, and grade the condition of every surface. You don't need professional shots — phone photos taken during a normal walk are exactly what works best.

Adding photos

Inside any project, open Capture. Each room has a 3-box header — Photo, Video, Notes. Tap the Photo box and you'll get the choice to pick from your phone's gallery or shoot a new one straight from the camera. Once the job is signed, the same button posts progress shots to the room and to the job's Feed at the same time.

[!steps]

1. Tap the Photo tile under the room you're working in.
2. Pick Take Photo to use the camera, or Choose from Gallery to upload existing shots.
3. On mobile, the camera opens directly to the back camera so you can shoot the room immediately.
4. Select as many as you want — they all upload in the background.

The app handles all the formats your phone might throw at it: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, plus HEIC and HEIF from iPhone, and TIFF and BMP if you're pulling from a desktop. Anything that isn't web-friendly gets converted automatically. iPhone HEIC photos get handled more gracefully now too — the rare conversion error silently skips that one photo so the rest of the batch still makes it up.

[!tip] Full-size photos are fine — straight off the camera, saved from a text, or AirDropped from a client, up to 25MB each. BidCraft shrinks its own working copy for the analysis, so you don't need to resize or screenshot anything first. Just shoot and go.

What makes a good photo

You don't need to be a photographer, but a few habits make the AI dramatically more accurate:

• Shoot from corner to corner — capture the whole room from one corner, then the opposite corner. Two opposite angles give BidCraft enough to triangulate dimensions.
• Get the fixtures in frame — toilet, vanity, tub, shower, niches. The app uses these as size references.
• Don't skip the floor — a clean floor shot helps it measure square footage.
• Include a tape measure if you've got one out — BidCraft reads the numbers off the tape and treats them as gospel.

Adding a walkthrough video

If you'd rather capture everything in one shot, use the Video tile instead. Walk the bathroom slowly — start at the door, pan across the floor, look up at the ceiling, hit the shower last. BidCraft samples the video about one frame per second and pulls dimensions, fixtures, and conditions from the whole walk.

[!steps]

1. Tap the Video tile under your room.
2. Pick Add Video and choose Record Now or Choose from Gallery.
3. Keep it short — about 30–60 seconds is the sweet spot for a single bathroom.
4. Upload and let BidCraft analyze in the background.

[!tip] Big videos get compressed automatically before they upload, so you don't have to fuss with resolution settings — just shoot and send. A focused 45-second walk still beats a sprawling three-minute one: it uploads faster and the AI reads it more cleanly. If a clip ever fails to upload, you'll get a clear error right away (not silence) — try a shorter walk or split it into two.

Talk while you walk — narration is captured automatically

Call out dimensions as you film — "the back wall is 5 by 8, the tub is 5 foot wide, 79 inches tall". BidCraft pulls the audio off your video and transcribes it into a voice note for you in the background. You don't have to do anything. A minute or two after upload, you'll see a small green ✓ Narration pill on the video chip in the room, and the transcript shows up in your Notes for that room.

The transcribed narration counts as the highest-trust source for dimensions and scope — same as a voice note you recorded directly. That means a narrated walkthrough alone is enough context for the AI to start drafting a scope of work. This works for any video you upload to a room, not just dedicated walkthroughs.

[!steps]

1. After uploading, give the room a minute or two for background transcription to land.
2. Refresh the page if needed — the ✓ Narration pill on the video shows when it's done.
3. If you don't see the pill, tap the video chip to open the preview panel and use Extract narration to re-run.

If BidCraft can't find any speech in the video (silent walkthrough, very noisy background), you'll see a muted No audio pill and a Try again button in the video's preview panel. If a transcription run hits a real error, the pill turns red and offers Retry transcription instead. Either way, you can also just add a voice or text note directly — that always works.

Click a video to play it

Tap any video chip inside a room to expand it. The video plays inline so you can confirm the upload worked and that your file is good, without leaving the project view. The same panel surfaces the transcription status and the retry button when you need it.

Got drawings? Upload them

If the homeowner, architect, or builder handed you a floor plan — or a whole drawing set with a tile schedule alongside it, or you sketched one yourself with real measurements on it — drop it in. The Plans box sits on every room card beside Notes, Image and Video, and takes PDFs, photos of a printed sheet, Excel files and CSVs, as many as you've got.

[!steps]

1. Tap Plans on a room card and drop in every file the builder sent. Big files are fine, and you don't pick pages.
2. Add a short note under Tell Biddy before it reads if it helps — something like "master bath is top-right, ignore the garage." It sits in the upload box the moment you open it, right under where the files go, and BidCraft reads it and focuses on the part you care about.
3. Wait for the files to finish reading. Sheets with tile work on them get read; roof plans and electrical get skipped on purpose. The card at the top of your rooms tells you where it's up to.
4. The printed dimensions and the schedule's specs flow into your rooms. Grabbed the wrong file? Remove it under View sheets and BidCraft offers to take its rooms with it.

One plan can cover multiple rooms — a whole-house sheet with the master bath, powder room, and a hall bath all labeled gets read in one pass, and each labeled area's numbers land where they belong.

[!tip] Printed dimensions on a plan are measured numbers, so BidCraft trusts them above anything it estimates from a photo. They still sit below your own voice notes and manual corrections — if you say the shower is 4 feet and the plan says 3, your word wins.

There's a lot more to it when the package is a real builder set — quick checks, per-room specs, and the sheet tag that shows where every number came from. See Reading drawing sets and tile schedules.

Photos vs. video — which to use

Both feed the same AI brain, so it's whatever fits how you work.

Lots of contractors take 6–10 photos plus one short walkthrough video. The AI cross-references everything, and the more sources it has, the tighter the numbers come out.

Each room's analysis includes the project-wide dimension rollup as the final step, so the measurements in Measurements & Scope are already populated by the time the analyzing spinner stops — no extra wait, no separate "compute" click. Cross-room math (totals across multiple bathrooms in one project) updates automatically as each subsequent room finishes. When you're ready to run everything, the Analyze project button at the bottom of Inputs queues every room and jumps you to Measurements & Scope, where the results land.

Next steps

Once you've got photos in, layer on a voice note or two — they're the highest-trust source of dimensions. Head to Recording voice and text notes. To understand how the analysis pulls everything together, see How photo analysis works.