Condition reporting is a vital part of art handling and collections care, crucial for any art professional’s due care and diligence. But too often, it can feel time-consuming and repetitive, especially when juggling tight schedules, complex installations, or transit logistics.
The good news? You can save time without compromising accuracy, professionalism, or standards. Here are 8 proven ways to speed up your condition reporting process while keeping your work thorough, consistent, and stress-free.
Using condition report templates saves time and ensures nothing gets overlooked. Articheck offers basic, standard, and detailed templates for a variety of objects:
Templates reduce second-guessing and even help guide newer team members to produce consistent, high-quality reports from day one.
Ever read a condition report and thought “what does this purple squiggly line mean?” Non-standardised terminology, particularly in annotations, wastes time and increases risk.
Eliminate uncertainty – and time spent back and forth clarifying details – by standardising your terminology.
Articheck’s glossary of damage types – created in collaboration with conservators – features universally understood condition types and simple, eye-catching symbols. Used by major institutions, private collections, and galleries around the world, our annotations are now the go-to standard in the industry.
Damage types and annotations in Articheck
Better photos bring clarity to your reports, which means fewer follow-ups and less stress.
Most of us now have a great quality camera in our pocket and keeping a few key tips in mind can make all the difference to your photos and therefore condition reports:
Need to document a moving part, fragile element, or complex surface? A short video often captures what 10 photos and a paragraph of text can’t – and is faster to record and review later on.
Video brings clarity to your reports and gives colleagues and clients greater confidence in the information you’re sharing.
Articheck is the only digital condition reporting platform with video capabilities – so your insights stay with the object record, not lost in an inbox or scattered across devices.
Add video to condition reports and specialised checks including:
Not everything needs a full condition report every time. When time is limited, triaging can help you focus resources where they’re needed most.
For example, you’ve just received a shipment of 100 objects and don’t have time to complete a full condition report of all the artworks that same day. Completing a brief assessment of each object and sorting them into categories will help you determine what objects require immediate care and should be prioritised accordingly. Make your life easier by sorting into categories such as:
Tip: Add a quick check to an object in Articheck and save your comments, name, and signature to the object record for easy reference later on. Articheck users with a pro subscription can also add photo or video to the check.
Triaging your objects by adding checks saves time and help focus attention.
Whether you’re working on the museum floor, at an art fair, in transit, or deep in a warehouse, capturing data in real time streamlines your workflow and saves huge chunks of time later on.
And when time is of the essence, accurately capturing information is crucial. You can take photos and video in the moment, ready for detailed review later.
With the Articheck web app, which works on the browser of any device, you can upload them to the object record there and then, adding notes and annotations as needed. Using the voice-to-text feature saves even more time – no typing, just talking.
With the Articheck iOS app, you can even work offline and sync your reports later when you’re back in the office. You’ll never forget a detail or scramble to match images to paperwork again.
Treatment Progress Check in Articheck
Condition reports are vital documentation for anyone involved in handling, preserving, or caring for artworks and, as such, may need to be shared across teams, departments, locations, and institutions.
Collaboration in the art world can all too often mean endless email chains or multiple phone calls to track down or confirm information. Paper condition reports can be lost or inaccessible to key stakeholders at crucial moments while PDF reports shared via email pose a security risk to your objects and organisation.
Storing condition reports in a secure and shareable digital database is fundamental to both protecting your artwork data and ensuring it’s easily accessible, only when needed, and only to those you give permission.
With Articheck:
Did you know? Sharing condition reports via email can expose you to liability and even invalidate your insurance.
Condition reporting doesn’t have to mean endless hours spent on paperwork. With the right templates, tools, and techniques – and by using a platform like Articheck – you can streamline your workflow without cutting corners.
With Articheck you can create reports from your mobile or desktop, attach videos and easily annotate images, and instantly share your work with colleagues, partners, or clients.
Articheck servers will undergo essential updates between 05:00 and 10:00 GMT on Sunday 17 November. During this time, our iOS and web apps will be temporarily unavailable. We apologise for any inconvenience.
