Photo privacy and location in a condition report
Body corporate sites are lived in. A photo of a failing balcony is also, often, a photo of someone's washing, their car and the inside of their lounge. So every photo taken in a condition assessment goes through a privacy check before it can appear in anything a client sees.
What the check does
As soon as a photo uploads, Surfacely looks for faces and people, number plates, and windows or doorways showing the inside of a home. Each one it finds is blurred on a copy. That copy is the only version a client ever sees, in the web report and in the PDF. Your original stays with your records and is never sent, linked or embedded anywhere client-facing.
The client-facing copy also carries no embedded data: no location, no device, no time. The position the report shows under a photo is the one Surfacely deliberately prints, not something left in the file.
What you see on each photo
- Waiting to upload: the photo is still on your phone (no signal). It will be checked once it has gone up.
- Not checked yet: uploaded, check still running.
- Checked, nothing to blur: clear.
- Blurred: 1 face (or 2 people, a number plate, a home interior): the check found something and blurred it.
- Held: couldn't be checked: the check could not finish. The photo stays out of the report until a check goes through. Tap Check again once you are online.
The check errs towards blurring. If it is unsure, it blurs.
Adjusting a blur
- Blur something else: anyone in the team can draw a box over something the check missed. It is blurred on the copy straight away.
- Un-blur it: only an owner, admin or manager can take a detected blur off, for example when it is hiding the very defect the photo is about. It asks you to confirm, and the removal is logged with who did it and when. Think before you do it: the blur was there because someone's face, car or home was in frame.
Every change is re-rendered from your original, so a removed blur genuinely comes off and an added one is never stacked on an earlier copy.
Where and which way
Each photo records your GPS position, its accuracy, and the compass heading, which the report turns into an elevation ("facing North"). Under every photo the client reads a line like Position recorded ±6 m · facing North, and an appendix lists every position, so a committee member or next year's painter can stand in the same spot.
A photo with no fix is kept and labelled Location not recorded. It is never blocked for that. On iPhones, compass permission is asked for once when you start the assessment; if you declined it, headings will be missing until you allow it in Settings.
Why a held photo blocks the send
The one promise this feature makes is that no photo reaches a client unchecked. So the review screen will not send a report while any photo it would use is still waiting, unchecked or held. A photo that is not attached to a defect or a photo point is not used by the report and does not block it.