New 360-degree photo documentation tools are a low-cost, low-effort means of having complete visual project records. On site, someone walks the job and captures 360-degree photos and videos. Then, software automatically organizes these photos and videos by location and date of capture. Anyone who wants to access the photos is presented with a calendar and floorplans of the project in a web app or mobile app. The calendar indicates on which days photos and videos were captured, allowing you to navigate quickly to any day of interest. With a day selected, the floorplan indicates the locations of photos and the paths of videos. You select a location on the floorplan and are brought into a Google Streetview-like experience.

Relying on 360-degree photo documentation that is performed by the owners or general contractor is usually a mistake. If you can negotiate access to their system at all (and that is a big if), you will find many of the things you want documented are not documented adequately. Once you have made the decision to adopt, things will begin grassroots. A small-scale project-level deployment is initiated by an enterprising project leader. The deployment usually involves the project manager as the decision maker with a field engineer, superintendent, or foreman performing data-capture and processing. Once a few projects have achieved success and experienced tangible benefits, higher-level management can be looped in to begin enterprise level deployment. This guidebook will help you through the process.