Certain types of business have a vital reliance on understanding the conditions on the ground in the territories they service. This is particularly important for leasing, financing, and insurance businesses that deal with property across the country. To have a presence in all their territories and in every neighborhood they service is virtually impossible with just an in-house work force. It is however critical that they have information on conditions on the ground for understanding risks to their business. Changes can occur that either increase risk or provide a new opportunity but with all the homes, properties, cars, trucks, boats, etc. out there it is very difficult to keep such inventories.

A solution to this is to employ a freelance base of photographers to go out into the local community and update their database with pictures of the local area. The very wide availability of digital cameras has made this trivially easy as most American households now have the capability to take and upload digital photos. This allows the interested companies to pay only for actual work done and easily allows them to have coast-to-coast coverage of most neighborhoods. Thanks to technology and equipment such as digital photography, they can reduce risk and attain a capability level that until very recently was all but impossible with out a prohibitively costly investment.