Q&A with Ross Somerville: Founder of WorkPhotos

“All I wanted was a WhatsApp-style group chat where everything is recorded job by job.”

At WorkPhotos, we want businesses to have quick access to photographic evidence of what they’ve really done. Ross Somerville, the founder of WorkPhotos, has spent years running West of Scotland Engineering Co Ltd, a Glasgow-based company that’s been solving problems for over a century. With his deep experience, Ross recognized a common issue—workers don’t want to use their personal apps for work, yet businesses need organized, reliable photo evidence. That’s where the idea for WorkPhotos came from.

In this Q&A, we sat down with Ross to get to know the person behind the app and learn more about why he started WorkPhotos. We discuss the challenges he’s faced along the way and how his background in engineering played a big role in shaping the app into what it is today.

Ross talks about the everyday issues workers face in industries like repair, service, and construction—issues that inspired the creation of WorkPhotos. He explains how the app is designed to solve these problems practically and simply. Ross also shares what it’s like balancing the demands of running a long-established engineering firm with developing an app and where he sees WorkPhotos heading in the future.

If you’re looking for a better way to manage job site photos without the hassle, WorkPhotos might be your need. Download it for free today and see how it can make your workday easier.

About Ross and His Background

Tell us a bit about your background and how you got started in the engineering industry.

I’m a repair engineer, although that’s a pretty broad term. I work on very industrial machinery parts—mostly hydraulic cylinders, parts of trucks, and all sorts of weird machinery. When you can’t buy new parts, that’s where we step in to fix it. I started at a young age, basically just annoying my father. I’d get chucked out of the house in the morning and come back in the evening after spending the day bashing bits of metal around and putting them back together. I always had a high enthusiasm for all things mechanical.

I ended up doing an engineering degree, but I hated uni. I spent most of my time doing maths, which wasn’t my strong point. In between all that, I was a race mechanic of sorts, helping out with race cars in the UK, sometimes in Europe—sometimes working on new cars, sometimes on historic racing. As it happens, my family business was repair engineering, and it had been going for about 80 years by that point. My dad and uncle owned it, and eventually, I bought them out, so now the business is mine.

I’ve always wanted to figure things out on my own and not just go down the route prescribed. I’ve also thought a lot about how work-life balance happens in this very manly, dirty industry. I wanted to change the industry because I still take a massive amount of pleasure from doing engineering—stripping things down, fixing them, and building them back up. When I started, the work environment was pretty rough. Everyone just shouted at each other, and everyone was pissed off all the time. Things got done, but it was very macho. I wanted to change that because I felt a work environment where we all treated each other with respect would be better. But that wasn’t how it was done when I first started. Now, we work as a team where everyone is respected, and we work together to solve and fix things for our customers. It’s a far cry from the frightening, shouty atmosphere that was there when I first started.

What’s it been like running a 104-year-old engineering firm in Glasgow?

It’s very cool. We've got overhead cranes, lots of manual machinery, and a team of nine working flat out to solve people’s problems. That’s what we do—we solve problems. Sometimes, you have to remind the customer that you’re there to help, not hinder, and that you’re doing your best. It’s extremely rewarding but also physically challenging and mentally brutal because every customer has a different expectation.

The big question is always: do they want something fixed, or do they want something that’s essentially brand new? My time is entirely dedicated to figuring out what they want without them having to say too much. Sometimes, I don’t need to give them something that’s basically brand new when all they wanted and expected was this little bit welded back together. So, it’s a real juggle. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes. It’s like a magic box—something comes in one side, and out the other side comes this fixed thing. But that magic box can be very chaotic!

What are some of your biggest lessons from running West of Scotland Engineering Co Ltd?

Learning how to be a people person is probably the most important. Understanding what people need, what they want, and how the relationship will work is crucial. Sometimes someone might bring in a £20 job, and it seems like nothing, but if you handle that well and professionally, and do a good job, they might bring in a £200,000 job later. You never know who that person might be. 

The reason we’ve lasted 104 years is because we try to fix lots of problems. We’re not niche or specialized; we deal with a wide range of issues, and that means we all have to be open to solving problems we didn’t even think would come into the shop. But understanding the customer and connecting with them is absolutely the key thing.

What keeps you passionate about both engineering and developing WorkPhotos?

What’s happened now is that my spare time has become where I go to lose myself in some engineering or building. I’ve got a few cars, and I’ll strip and rebuild an engine—that’s what I love. What keeps me enthused, even when I’m in the depths of the most stressful parts of what I do, is that we’re solving problems for other people. Both engineering and WorkPhotos are about solving problems.

I know there are millions of people out there who work in teams, who fix, build, make, or repair things, and who are taking photos at work and finding it a nightmare—or not taking photos at all because it’s too hard and they can’t be bothered. We’re helping those people deal with the same stresses. If I can help 10-20 customers a day at West of Scotland Engineering and solve their problems, imagine if I can help make 200,000 jobs a day easier for those people using WorkPhotos.

The Story Behind WorkPhotos

What made you want to create WorkPhotos? Was there a specific moment or problem that led to it?

I remember exactly why I started WorkPhotos, or at least how the journey began. I was standing in the middle of the workshop, surrounded by jobs I didn’t know much about, phones ringing, and all the usual noise and distractions. I had a lot on my mind, problems to solve, and it just felt like chaos. I thought to myself, we take photos in our personal lives all the time to capture memories, but here, in this chaotic environment, no one is taking photos to help them work better. And if they are, they have no idea where those photos are, when they took them, and there’s definitely no reference that might help them figure anything out.

 I was being asked, "Have you done this axle?" and I had six axles sitting on the floor—I had no idea which one was which. That’s when it hit me: why don’t we have organized photos of every job? It would be so helpful. But if we did take photos of all these jobs, we’d be stuck using WhatsApp, text messages, or emails, which would be a nightmare. Taking photos at work was a nightmare!

That’s where it all started. I realized there had to be a solution. The choices out there were either free tools that are basically just social tools you can hack for work, or full-on job management software, with nothing in between. I thought, we’ve got to do this. All I wanted was a WhatsApp-style group chat where everything is recorded job by job. If we could create that, it would be brilliant for us, and if it’s good enough, others could use it too. So we built it, and it’s been a hell of a journey trying to get it together! Naively, I thought it would be simple, but that wasn’t the case. 

I also want to say it wouldn’t have worked without the people I’ve got helping me build it. I’ve been joined by a couple of guys with the skills to make it good. I was very naive at first, thinking I could just build this thing and it would be simple. But it actually takes a shed load of effort, time, and money to build something like this from scratch. It needs to be high quality, it needs to work, it can’t just be rubbish. We weren’t building a computer game where you can forgive a few glitches. If you’re taking hundreds of photos at work and suddenly we lose all your photos—that’s a big problem. So we had this all-or-nothing approach.

How did your team at West of Scotland Engineering Co Ltd react when you first introduced WorkPhotos?

You know, every team’s got a variety of people in it. There are folks at West of Scotland who probably wouldn’t say more than half a dozen words to me in a day—not out of badness, they just like working on their own in silence, and that’s great. They just focus and get on with it. I honestly thought those people wouldn’t be interested. I figured they’d just say, "No, Ross, sod off. You’re having a midlife crisis or something. Get it over with."

But I was really surprised. The people I thought wouldn’t use it at all ended up using it loads. And the ones I figured were more tech-friendly were super keen on it, too. That made me think, "Okay, what’s going on here?" And then it clicked—I realized they were using it so much because they were trying to cover their own backsides. I had always been focused on how this would benefit the business. Personally, I had all these problems because I didn’t have photographic evidence. Even the simplest problem, like "Whose job is that?"—I didn’t know. No one wrote a name on it, no one put a tag on it, so I had no idea. But with WorkPhotos, I could find that out.

Then I realized the problem was on both sides. The workers were desperate to show that they did their job and for good reason. If they could take a photo and say, "That’s why I did what I did," then if the job went wrong at the customer’s end, they could say, "Well, that’s what I was looking at the time. Would you have done any different?"

So yeah, at that point, I thought, "This is really interesting." We could get WorkPhotos out to the workers, they could adopt it, and then the business could follow. That was a new concept to me. At the time, really, the only company that had done anything like that on a large scale was Slack. They got the workers to create Slack channels, and then businesses had to convince the person who started it to transfer ownership to the company. So I thought, "Yeah, okay, we could go down that route."

Can you share an example of how WorkPhotos has made a difference in your own company?

Sure. It might sound cheesy, but I was thinking about this the other day. The only reason I can actually build WorkPhotos is because at least half the time I used to spend at West of Scotland Engineering has been freed up by having photographic evidence. Before, half my day was spent running back and forth asking, "Have you done that? Where are we with that job? What did we get from the customer? Where’s the fault in that? Can you remember if we did that before?" It was constant questions, and if I’m running around doing that all the time, I’m not actually doing any real work—I’m just chasing my tail.

By using WorkPhotos, I’ve cut down the time I need to spend at West of Scotland Engineering. Right now, I’m at home, and I can spend at least half my day fully focused on building WorkPhotos. It’s proven to me and my team that it’s a real time saver. It’s amazing how much time you waste doing tasks that could be avoided with a simple tool like this. Businesses, almost all of them, have the same situation. But you get so used to running around like crazy that you forget that’s not actually the point of you being there.

What types of industries do you think would benefit most from WorkPhotos?

Honestly, any industry where there’s a lot of repetitive work would benefit, whether it’s the same thing over and over or jobs with slight variations. Take a company that repairs turbos, for example. All their work is about turbos, but each type has its own nuances, and they need photos from start to finish. Out of every hundred jobs, there’s always one where the customer might complain—whether it’s legitimate or not. Without proof, you’re often left just giving them a new turbo, losing £2,000 or £3,000 instantly.

You want to have backup when things go wrong, and there’s nothing more satisfying than going into your WorkPhotos account and finding the proof that you did the job right. Or, on the flip side, realizing that, yeah, hands up, we missed something, and we need to sort it out. Either way, you’ve solved the problem, which lets you move on.

 So, any business that’s hands-on—whether it’s in trades like construction, engineering, repair, or service work, even dog walking or hair cutting—can benefit. If you take images from start to finish, you can shut down fraudulent claims, sort out weird problems that pop up, and have a reference for the day-to-day questions you need to answer.

About WorkPhotos

For those who don’t know, can you explain what WorkPhotos does and how it works?

WorkPhotos is a mobile app that works like a camera app, but it’s designed for teams at work. You take all the photos you need, similar to how you’d share in a WhatsApp group chat, but instead of an endless scroll of images, everything is organized job by job. You can’t just let images pile up into a mess—everything has to go into a job.

WorkPhotos is all about managing the photos your company needs. It benefits employees by giving them evidence of what they’ve done. The more photos they take, the more the business benefits because it has access to all the images needed to track and query the work. It also brings the team together in a way that’s unusual because everyone—from the office worker to the apprentice—can see what’s going on and take responsibility.

Having the office connected to it is a big deal too. When someone’s writing an invoice or putting together a quote, they can actually see what the job was, and that really helps with customer relations. While everyone benefits from using WorkPhotos—the employees, the office staff, the company as a whole—the person who’s managing the day-to-day work, dealing with customers, and handling problems and promises, they’re going to benefit the most.

How does WorkPhotos help solve common problems that workers face on-site, like keeping photos organized or communicating with the team?

I think one interesting aspect that might not have come up yet is what happens when you start using WorkPhotos. When you invite your team, there’s no barrier to entry for them. Here’s what I mean: if I went into the workshop without WorkPhotos and said, “Everyone, start taking photos of every job from now on. I’m not dealing with the issues from bad customers or mistakes we’ve made—just take photos of everything,” some employees would do it, some might share one or two photos, and others would barely take any at all.

The reason for that is simple—some don’t want to clutter up their camera roll with work photos. They don’t like mixing personal and work stuff, and they’re not keen on using personal apps like WhatsApp or their messaging app for work-related things. But with WorkPhotos, it’s completely separate, just for work, and only with colleagues. That makes adoption of the app go through the roof.

The onboarding process is really smooth, which is important because a lot of companies struggle with getting staff to adopt new software. That’s why we’ve kept it simple—we didn’t want to dive into full job management software. We’re focused on one thing: being a camera app for work.

How do you see WorkPhotos growing in the future? Are there any new features or updates you’re excited about?

One of the biggest advancements we’re working on is integrating image analysis tools. There’s some really cool AI technology out there, and while a lot of it is still in its early stages, it has the potential to be incredibly useful. For example, in the workplace, I’m constantly asked questions like, “Have we done this type of job before?” or “Didn’t we do that job a few months ago?” If WorkPhotos could answer those questions by pulling up images of similar jobs, that would be a game-changer.

Imagine being able to ask WorkPhotos, “Can you show me all the yellow hydraulic rams we’ve worked on?” and instantly getting a list of jobs with those images. That’s where we’re heading—combining the content you’ve already captured with advanced image analysis and AI. The goal is to make WorkPhotos not just a tool for recording images but a tool that actively solves problems for you. 

Personal Insights and Reflections

What’s been the most rewarding part of developing WorkPhotos and seeing it used by others?

Honestly, one of the most rewarding things has been seeing people actually subscribe to WorkPhotos. I’ve poured so much time, money, and effort into building this tool for others, so when someone is willing to pay the subscription fee—whether it’s £5.99 a month per user, or whatever size their business is—it feels incredibly rewarding. It’s not easy to convince people to spend money on something, no matter how much you talk it up, so seeing users onboard, subscribe, and use the product regularly is a huge validation. When I’m dealing with something tricky or unexpected, checking the daily numbers and seeing all the users online reminds me that it’s all worthwhile.

How do you balance your time between running an engineering firm and managing a software company?

It's brutally difficult, to be honest. My brain is constantly split between WorkPhotos, handling things at West of Scotland—mostly admin and the occasional customer issue—and then there's family life. I’ve got two young kids, and all the needs and wants that come with that, plus just trying to be a normal human being. So, you’ve really got to carve out your time. People often say, "I haven’t got time for that," but you do if you break it down. From four to five, I’m doing this, from five to seven, I’m with the kids, from nine till ten, I’m catching up on emails, and then it’s up at five in the morning to do it all again. The trick is not to dig yourself into a hole. Sometimes I manage it well, sometimes not so much.

What advice would you give to other business owners thinking about developing their own software?

I was fortunate enough to meet a couple of people who were deeply rooted in the software industry, and they helped me along the way. But, essentially, I went from having skills in manually repairing things to suddenly being the owner and developer of a software product—those aren’t exactly complementary skills. The product solved the problems I needed it to, but the transition wasn’t easy.

My advice? Take a really, really long time to think before committing to it. Having an idea is one thing, but if it’s truly a great idea, you can bet that a lot of other people will have it too. There needs to be a pressing reason why you’re the person to take that idea and make it viable. That’s the unique and unusual part. If you’re lucky, like I’ve been, you’ll find something with mass appeal that fits perfectly into the niche you’re in. But most of the time, that luck doesn’t come easily—and it really is luck.

Finally, what’s next for you and WorkPhotos? What are your goals moving forward?

Goal number one is to get an institutional investor on board. We’ve proven that there’s a need for WorkPhotos—it’s widespread, with users and subscribers all over the world. The right investor could really add value, not just financially, but by helping us scale and reach even more people.

Long-term, I want to see the app evolve from just being a camera tool to something more—a real helper on the job. There’s incredible potential in integrating AI and machine learning, which could make WorkPhotos even more valuable. We’ll see where that takes us, but the possibilities are exciting.

Bonus Quick Fire Questions

If you could give one tip to someone starting out in the trades, what would it be?

Pick a trade that’s connected to something you enjoy outside of work. If you love building road bikes, become a mechanic. If you enjoy gardening, consider landscaping. You need to enjoy what you do because as you progress, it can become less fun—unless you truly love the trade.

Early riser or late sleeper?

Early riser, alarm set for 5 am. I need to blitz through the morning to feel like I’m making progress.

What's the best advice you’ve ever been given?

Read the customer, and put yourself in their shoes.

Tea or coffee to get you going in the morning?

Coffee, though I wish I could give it up!

What’s your way to chill out after a hard day?

Music on, and then I strip and rebuild something for myself. I’ve got four older cars and a boat that I’m constantly tinkering with.

If you weren’t doing engineering or building this app, what job would you most love to be doing?

Copywriting or advertising. I’d love to work for other brands.

What’s something about you that might surprise people?

I’d rather stand alone in a river fly fishing than go to a pub.

What's the most satisfying part of your day-to-day?

Helping others get what they need done. Progress is king.