Trace | Job Site Photo Documentation Flutter App With Laravel Backend

Trace: Job Site Photo Documentation That Files Itself

Contractors take thousands of photos and lose most of them. They sit in a camera roll, unsorted, until somebody needs one for a dispute and cannot find it. Trace is the layer that fixes that: crews photograph the work, photos file themselves to the right job by GPS, and the office turns them into branded reports a client can open without an account.

Self-hosted. One payment. Unlimited crew: no per-user fee, ever.

The part that actually matters

Tagging a photo to a project is trivial. What is not trivial is this: a crew member takes forty photos in a basement with no signal, drives home, and every one of them lands. In order. None dropped, none duplicated.

• The device is authoritative until the server says otherwise. The file is written to the phone and a row to its own database before any network call is attempted.
• Uploads are idempotent. Every capture carries an identifier generated at the shutter and sent unchanged on every retry. A response lost on a dying connection costs a retry, never a duplicate.
• Nothing fails silently. Failures stay visible and retryable, and the office sees which phones are still holding photos.

The matcher refuses to guess

Auto-filing is only worth having if crews stop double-checking it. Trace declines to decide, and asks, when two jobs are within 40m of each other, when the GPS fix is coarser than 100m, or when you are near a job but outside its radius. Being confidently wrong once costs more trust than being unsure ten times.

The dashboard publishes the auto-match rate including the times it refused. A product whose central claim is that it does not guess should be willing to show how often that happens.

What you get

• Flutter capture app: camera-first, offline queue, GPS matching on the device, before-and-after pairs, checklists worked through on site.
• Laravel office dashboard. Photo feed, project map, customers, tasks, pages, checklists, reports, insights, a command palette.
• Branded PDF reports and revocable share links, with client signature capture.
• Live project links: a homeowner watches progress instead of being emailed a PDF every Friday.
• Public portfolio of finished work for the contractor’s own site.
• Platform admin: analytics, tenants, plans, help center, legal documents, announcements, branding.
• REST API and signed webhooks, with scoped tokens and a full developer portal.
• Complete source for both applications, and documentation written for somebody who has not seen the codebase.

AI without a subscription

The hosted competition meters AI by credits, which tells you it is reselling a per-call cost. A one-time license cannot carry that, so Trace inverts it: you supply the provider. OpenAI, Anthropic, any compatible endpoint, or a local model on your own hardware, in which case nothing leaves your building. Spoken notes become captions, reports draft themselves from your own tags and timestamps, checklists write a first pass.

Only text ever leaves: captions, tags, timestamps. The images never do. With nothing configured the features are simply absent and nothing else changes.

It complements your job system, it does not replace it

Trace is the photo layer. It is not a CRM and not a field service platform. If you already run one, Trace pushes photos and finished reports into it over signed webhooks and exposes a read API for pulling on your own schedule.

Requirements

• PHP 8.2 or newer, MySQL 8 / MariaDB 10.6 or newer, Composer, and Node to build assets
• Flutter (current stable) to build the mobile app
• Any storage you choose: local disk or S3-compatible