The hard nos of material

Do not send a judge anyone but yourself, anything that identifies you by accident, or any material before a quote is accepted. Those three reliably end a commission before it begins, and none of them is about the request itself.

They are about what got sent, and they are worth knowing before you attach anything, because a judge who receives one of these rarely explains why they went quiet - they just do.

Anyone but you

A judge can only assess someone who agreed to be assessed. That consent is yours to give for yourself and nobody else's to give on your behalf, so a photo of a partner, an ex, or a stranger gets refused on sight, no matter how the request is framed. This is the same rule from the other side of the transaction - judges enforce it because platforms require it, and because doing otherwise would mean assessing someone who never agreed to be looked at.

Unintended identifiers

A photo cropped for the frame you meant to send but still carrying a face in a mirror, a recognisable room, a piece of mail with your name on a table in the background - these are not what you meant to send, and a professional judge treats them as a mistake rather than as bonus material. Check the frame, not just the subject, before you attach anything. Some identifiers are invisible: Apple's own personal safety guide notes that when photos with location metadata are shared, recipients "may be able to access the location metadata and learn where it was taken." This is worth doing regardless of how confident you feel about anonymity - most buyers stay anonymous by default and it takes almost no effort to keep it that way.

Material before a quote

Sending photos with your first message, before a judge has agreed to look, skips the step where they consented to the job at all. The sequence matters enough to be its own rule: brief first, material after acceptance. Doing it out of order does not save time, it reads as not having understood how the arrangement works, which is a worse first impression than a slightly slower start.

Why these three specifically

Each one is a consent problem wearing the shape of a convenience: sending someone else's photo skips their consent, sending an unintended identifier skips your own considered consent, and sending material early skips the judge's. Everything else about material - how many, which ones, how clear - is a quality question and has more give in it than these three, which do not.

A quick check before you send anything

Three questions cover all of it: is everyone in the frame someone who agreed to be here, is there anything in the background or the edges I did not mean to include, and has the judge actually said yes to this yet. A yes-no-yes on those three is the whole gate, and it takes less time to run through than it takes to attach the file.

Why judges do not usually explain a refusal

When one of these three lines gets crossed, the common response from a judge is not a message explaining why - it is silence, or a short decline, or in a repeated case a block. That is not rudeness on their part; explaining a consent breach in detail to the person who committed it is emotional labour a professional is not obliged to provide, and platforms exist partly so a judge does not have to be the one who spells it out.

If you are not sure whether something crosses a line

When in doubt about an identifier or about whether a request is even accepted, ask before sending anything - a plain question costs nothing and gets a plain answer, where sending the material and hoping it is fine risks all three problems at once. This is worth doing even for buyers who feel confident; the frame of a photo is easy to misjudge about your own material precisely because you already know what is in it and a stranger does not.

Getting the rest right

Once the hard nos are out of the way, the rest is about making the judge's job easier: two or three clear photos beats a folder, and clarity matters more than quantity - the same principle that keeps an automated score reliable applies to a person's read too. If a figure is part of what you want covered, taking a proper measurement and stating it removes a guess that a photo alone cannot answer, regardless of how many you send.

If you would rather skip the whole question of what to send a person, an automated score works from photos with the same care around identifying material, and Rate Cock is a reasonable place to compare the two paths before choosing either.