A Documentation Checklist for Every Piece You Finish

The six shots, every time

The routine below takes about ten minutes once the setup is fixed and covers almost every future use: a listing, a submission, a catalogue, an insurance claim, a print, a social post, and the conversation you will have in fifteen years with someone writing about your work.

Do it before the piece leaves the studio, before it goes into a frame if the frame is not permanent, and before it is wrapped. If you only manage two of the six, make them the square-on full view and the back of the work.

The back-of-work shot is the one people skip and later need most. It carries your signature, the date, the title, any inventory number, the stretcher or panel construction and any gallery labels. It is the closest thing an artwork has to a passport, and it is what an authenticator or an insurer will ask for.

• One square-on full view, whole piece, edge to edge, no crop
• Two details at roughly life size: one at an edge, one in the busiest area
• One scale shot showing the piece against a known object or in a real room
• One back-of-work shot with signature, date and any labels legible
• One raking-light frame if the surface has texture worth recording
• One condition frame of any existing flaw, chip or repair

Fix the spot, not the technique

The single change that makes an archive comparable across years is doing it in the same place with the same light every time. Mark the floor with tape where the camera goes and where the work goes. Note the height. Use the same two lights, in the same positions, with the room lights off and the curtains shut so daylight is not adding an uncontrolled variable that changes with the season.

This matters more than the quality of the setup. A modest, consistent setup produces an archive where a 2021 piece and a 2026 piece can sit side by side in a grant application without one looking cold and the other looking amber. A beautiful but improvised setup produces twenty years of images that never quite match.

Write the setup down and tape it to the wall: which lights, what distance, camera height, white balance setting, and the exposure compensation you landed on. You will forget it after a two-month gap, and rediscovering it costs an afternoon each time.

Shoot for the largest use you can imagine

Always capture at the highest quality the camera offers, and keep the original file. A future catalogue may need a full-page reproduction; an application portal may want a two-thousand-pixel version; a website wants something small. You can always make a small file from a large one and never the reverse.

Shoot the full view with a little breathing room around the piece rather than cropping tight in camera. That margin gives you room to square up perspective later and to crop to whatever aspect ratio a future portal demands without cutting into the work itself.

If you can, include a small neutral grey card in one extra frame of each session. It costs one shutter press and it gives you an objective reference for colour correction years later, when you no longer remember what the light was doing that afternoon.

File naming and the written record

A folder of files called IMG_4471 is not an archive, it is a haystack. Adopt a naming pattern and never deviate: year, a short title slug, and a shot code. Something like 2026-tidal-drift-full.jpg, 2026-tidal-drift-detail-01.jpg, 2026-tidal-drift-verso.jpg. It sorts correctly, it survives being emailed around, and it tells you what an orphaned file is when you find it on an old drive.

Alongside the files, keep one row per piece in a spreadsheet: title, year, medium, dimensions in both metric and imperial, edition details if any, where it went, what it sold for, and any exhibition history. This is boring for the first thirty pieces and invaluable at piece two hundred, when someone asks for a CV of exhibitions or an insurer asks for a valuation basis.

Back it up in two places, one of them off-site. An archive that exists only on the studio laptop is one spilt cup of tea away from not existing at all.

Where editing belongs in the routine

Correction is the last step before filing, not a substitute for a consistent capture. Once the frames are shot, the honest work left is squaring the perspective, neutralising whatever cast the room contributed, and evening out brightness falloff so the corners of a large piece are not darker than the centre.

Foxi AI is a reasonable fit for that pass because you can describe the correction in plain words rather than hunting for a slider, and a typical result comes back in under a minute. It works one photo at a time, so treat it as a step at the end of a session rather than something that will chew through a backlog of four hundred files unattended.

Keep the corrected version and the original. The original is your evidence of what the camera actually recorded; the corrected file is what you send out. If a question about colour ever arises with a buyer or a publisher, having both is the difference between a conversation and an argument.

Making it survive contact with real life

The routine fails when it is a separate task. Attach it to something that already happens: the piece is not finished until it is documented, or nothing gets wrapped until the folder exists. Some artists document on a fixed day, batching whatever accumulated that fortnight, which works as long as nothing ships in between.

Keep the setup semi-permanent if you have the room. A tripod that stays put and lights that live on their stands remove the twenty minutes of setup that is the real reason documentation gets skipped.

Accept a lower standard for work in progress and a high one for finished pieces. Trying to archive everything to the same level guarantees you will archive nothing. Six good frames of the finished piece is the non-negotiable part; everything else is a bonus.

Frequently asked