Brief first, material after

Do not send photos to a judge before they have quoted and agreed to take the request. Send the brief, wait for a quote or questions, and only then send material; reversing that order, however well meant, is a small consent breach dressed up as efficiency.

Why the order is the point

A judge who has not yet agreed to take a request has not agreed to look at anything either. Attaching photos to the first message removes their chance to say no before they have seen material they never consented to receive. It does not matter that you meant it helpfully - the judge did not choose to look, and that is the thing the sequence protects. Data protection law runs on a similar instinct for organisations: in the UK Information Commissioner's Office guide to data minimisation, personal data should be "adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary," and photos sent before anyone has agreed to need them are the everyday version of collecting more than is needed.

It also does not save time

The instinct behind sending everything up front is usually "why waste a round trip." In practice it does the opposite: a judge who receives unsolicited material along with a first message often replies more cautiously, not less, because the worst first messages judges receive train them to expect trouble from whoever sends one. A clean brief with nothing attached gets read as competent and gets a faster, warmer reply.

What a correct first message contains

Register, rough length, one specific detail, and that you understand the price comes back as a quote. No attachments. The full shape of a first message that works covers this in more detail; this page is only about the one sequencing rule inside it.

What it looks like from the judge's side

A judge opening a message with photos attached, before any brief or agreement, cannot simply glance past the images to read the words first - the material is already there, already seen, whether or not it was wanted. That is exactly the harm the sequence is built to prevent, and it does not matter that the buyer meant no offence by it. Intention is not the thing being protected against; the sequence is protecting the judge's right to decide, before anything arrives, whether they want to look at all.

If you are not sure a judge takes the request

Ask the general question first, without material attached: "do you do this kind of request?" A one-line question about fit is a normal, welcome thing to send before a full brief, let alone before photos. It costs the judge nothing to answer and it saves both of you the awkwardness of material sent toward a request that was never going to be accepted.

After acceptance

Once a judge has quoted and you have accepted, material goes over as part of the same process, not a separate ask. Nothing about this changes what you should and should not send - the sequencing rule sits alongside those, not instead of them.

An automated tool has no consent step to sequence around - you upload and it scores - which is one of the plainer differences between the two kinds of assessment, and why an algorithm can start from a photo with nothing to agree to first is worth knowing if the sequencing here feels like unnecessary friction; it is not friction, it is the part a person requires and a machine does not. The same is true if a measurement is the actual goal - a stated figure from a proper method needs no judge's agreement at all, because nobody is being asked to look at anything. Rate Cock explains that trade-off if you are deciding which fits what you want.