DELIVERABLES
What you actually receive
Aerial photography gets sold on the flying and judged on the folder. This is what lands in your hands after a progress shoot, in what format, and how a project team is meant to use it.
STILLS
Full resolution JPEG
VIDEO
4K, ProRes on request
NAMING
Dated and sequential
LICENCE
Yours to use and publish
THE FILES
Full resolution, no watermark, no drip feed
You get the finished set at full resolution. Not proofs, not a gallery you have to request downloads from one at a time, and nothing stamped across the corner. Progress documentation is a working asset, and an asset you cannot freely hand to a sub or a lender is not much of one.
Stills come out as JPEG at the sensor’s full resolution, which leaves room to crop hard into a corner of the site and still have something printable. Video is delivered in 4K as standard, with Apple ProRes available when there is an editor downstream who will actually grade it.
THE PART NOBODY MENTIONS
Naming is half the value
A folder called Final_v2 is where documentation goes to die. Files come named by date and sequence, so a set from March sorts next to a set from April and anybody can find a month without opening anything.
On a two year project that is the difference between a record you use and an archive you dread. It costs nothing at the point of delivery and it is the single most common thing people thank me for later.
One frame from a dated monthly set, delivered at full resolution.
WHAT IS IN A TYPICAL SET
A progress shoot, unpacked
The site overview
A wide frame that gets the whole property in, including access, laydown, and the neighbouring parcels. This is the one that ends up in the monthly report.
The top down
Straight down over the structure. The most useful single image on any jobsite, because two people can mark up the same one instead of describing locations.
The elevations
A pass around the building at working height so each face is documented. Useful for facade progress and for anybody arguing about sequence.
Detail frames
Closer work on whatever is actually happening this month: a pour, a lift, a roof, a tie in. These are the ones that date the set.
Video, if requested
Cut or raw depending on what you asked for, sized for wherever it is going.
A map, if requested
Measurable top down imagery is a separate deliverable. See drone mapping.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Practical details
How do the files get to me?
A download link with the full set. No account to create, no expiry pressure, and it can go to more than one person on your team.
Can we use the photos in marketing and proposals?
Yes. You get usage rights to publish, print, and put them in pursuit material. That is the point of paying for them.
Do you keep a copy?
Yes, which has saved more than one client who deleted a folder eighteen months later. It is a backstop, not a substitute for your own archive.
Can you match a format our document system needs?
Usually. If your system wants a particular size, aspect, or naming convention, say so at the start and it gets built into the delivery rather than fixed afterward.
Is a legal survey included?
No, and this is an important distinction. Mapping deliverables are planning and documentation tools. Boundary and legal land surveys must be prepared by a Kentucky licensed professional land surveyor.
THE FILE IN THREE YEARS
Documentation is only as good as it is findable
The value of a progress archive decays fast if nobody can navigate it. That decay is almost never about image quality. It is about naming, structure, and whether the person who inherits the folder can work out what they are looking at without asking.
Which is why the delivery is dated and sequential rather than descriptive. A file called 2026-03-18_site-overview_04.jpg tells the truth forever. A file called front of building FINAL.jpg stops meaning anything the moment there is a second building or a second final.
The same logic applies to what gets kept. Every usable frame is delivered rather than a curated handful, because the frame that matters in two years is frequently not the one that looked best on the day.
PRACTICAL FORMAT NOTES
What to ask for, and when
Full resolution JPEG
The default, and correct for almost everything: reports, marketing, print, and cropping hard into a corner of the site.
4K video
Standard for motion. Leaves room to reframe and stabilise without softening the delivered cut.
Apple ProRes
Ask for it only if somebody is genuinely grading the footage. The files are large and the benefit is invisible unless it is being used.
Measurable top down
A different deliverable with a different process. See drone mapping, and note it is a planning tool, not a legal survey.
A specific naming convention
If your document system expects one, say so at the start. Retrofitting names across two years of sets is tedious and avoidable.
Vertical crops
Increasingly worth asking for if the footage is going to social. Cheaper to plan than to salvage.
PROGRESS DOCUMENTATION
See what a full set looks like.
Captured across Kentucky by Aerial Photography Louisville.
