<p>Despite their important role in pollinating wild and crop plants, there are critical gaps in our understanding of bee biology and their response to environmental change. Declines in insect populations raise concerns regarding traditional methods of insect monitoring, which could adversely impact bee populations. Recent technological advances in mobile-phone cameras provide an opportunity to use macro photography to survey mobile organisms, such as bees, without needing to collect them. If such photographic surveys reliably document bee diversity, the near ubiquity of such cameras could be leveraged to broaden the geographic and temporal scale of sampling. Photographic surveys could be performed by researchers or trained participatory (i.e., citizen) scientists, with the bees identified by experts on platforms such as iNaturalist. We assessed the accuracy of timed, systematic photographic surveys by comparing them to aerial netting. We then examined if trained community members in the participatory project Shutterbee accurately photographed the bee diversity in managed urban areas. There was a high level of similarity between aerial netting and photography across 22 bee taxa. Shutterbee participants varied in their ability to accurately photograph the bee diversity at a location. To address this challenge, we propose an analytical assessment of data quality to identify participants with the least biased sampling. This research shows that if data quality checks are employed, photography can be used to collect data on bees that can be used to answer large-scale research questions.</p>