Photo cadence

We use progress photos to show customers their order is real and on track. Each RFQ has a required photo cadence determined by its certs / tolerances / assembly flag — Mekka surfaces it on the per-RFQ Brief.

The five stages

• Kickoff — material in hand, machine queued. One photo of the stock + the work order ref.
• Machining — chips flying / printer printing. One photo mid-run.
• Finishing — surface treatment, post-processing. Skip if there isn't a finishing step.
• QA — inspection / measurement. Shot of caliper or CMM with the part visible.
• Packed — in the box, ready to ship. Top-down on the box, lid open.

What good looks like

• Even lighting; daylight is fine. Avoid hard shadows hiding features.
• Ruler in shot for first kickoff and packed photos so scale is obvious.
• For QA, a measurement reading visible on the caliper.
• Captions matter — one short line per photo, e.g. "first kickoff: 6061 stock, RFQ-4f2a8c1e".

Cadence rules

The Brief tells you exactly which stages are required for the RFQ. Standard tier needs only kickoff + packed. Cert-flagged or tight-tolerance jobs add machining + qa. Aerospace / medical tier additionally requires finishing.

How to send photos

If you have a partner-dashboard login, upload directly via /foundry/partner/rfqs/[id]. If you're routing through email for now, send images to foundry-ops@mekka.co with the RFQ ref in the subject and we'll upload them on your behalf.