Most rental photographs are useless as evidence, and the reason is always one of three things: nobody can tell where the photograph was taken, nobody can tell when, or there is nothing to compare it to.
Fix those three and an ordinary phone is enough. You do not need a good camera. You need a method.
The three-shot rule
For every mark, defect or item worth recording, take three photographs in this order:
Wide. The whole room from the doorway. This establishes which room and gives everything else a place to sit.
Medium. The surface in relation to something fixed and identifiable — a door frame, a window, a radiator, a socket. This is the shot that says *where on that wall*. It is the one people skip, and it is the one that does the work.
Close. The mark itself, sharp and filling the frame.
A close-up on its own could be any wall in any property in the country. A close-up with a medium shot behind it is anchored to a specific place that can be found again at check-out.
Why the medium shot decides disputes
At the end of the tenancy the landlord photographs a scratch and says it is new.
If your only move-in photograph is a tight close-up of a similar scratch, an adjudicator has two close-ups of a scratch and no way to know they are the same scratch. That is a coin toss, and coin tosses tend to favour whoever is claiming.
If your move-in set contains a medium shot showing that scratch 30cm to the left of the light switch, on the wall opposite the window, the adjudicator can match them. The question stops being "is this the same damage" and becomes "this was already there", which is a completely different argument.
Get the technical basics right
Clean the lens. A smudged lens produces a haze that reads as a smear on a wall. You will not be able to tell the difference in two years either.
Turn the lights on and open the curtains. Underexposed photographs hide the very thing you are trying to record, and brightening them later invites the argument that you edited them.
Hold still and check focus. A blurred close-up evidences nothing. Take it twice.
Shoot straight on. A surface photographed at a sharp angle distorts the size of what is on it.
Do not use flash on glossy surfaces. Glass, tiles, gloss paint and mirrors bounce it straight back and hide what is underneath.
Fill the frame for close-ups. Get close enough that the mark is the subject, not a detail in a wide scene.
Never edit, crop or filter
Keep the originals exactly as the camera produced them.
A cropped image raises an immediate question about what was outside the crop, and you will not be there to answer it. A filtered or brightened image invites the suggestion that the condition was altered. A screenshot of a photograph loses the original file information and gains nothing.
If you want to annotate — an arrow, a circle — do it on a copy and send both.
Send originals, and keep them. This is the single easiest way to lose credibility in a file you otherwise built well.
Dates, and why phone timestamps are weaker than you think
Your phone records when a photograph was taken, which sounds like it settles the question of date.
It is weaker than it looks. That information travels inconsistently — it is often stripped when images are sent through messaging apps, compressed by email, or re-saved. And it can be altered on the device. An adjudicator will generally take it at face value in the absence of a reason not to, but it is not the strong proof people assume.
What strengthens it enormously is sending the photographs somewhere outside your own control, on the day: emailing the whole set to the landlord or agent on move-in day creates a dated record neither of you can quietly revise. That email is often worth more than the timestamps.
Do it before the boxes come in
The floor under the sofa and the wall behind the wardrobe cannot be photographed once the sofa and wardrobe are there — and those are exactly the surfaces a check-out inspection finds things on.
Photograph while the property is empty, even if the removal van is waiting. Twenty minutes on the day beats any amount of reconstruction later.
Our move-in checklist lists every room and fixture to photograph before the boxes arrive.
Match them at the other end
At check-out, return to the same positions and take the same shots.
Standing where you stood a year ago, framing the same wall, produces a pair an adjudicator can lay side by side. That comparison is the strongest single thing you can put in a deposit file, and it costs nothing but the effort of doing it deliberately rather than randomly.
Take the move-out set with the property empty, after the last box is out.
Our move-out checklist follows the same room order, so your photos match.
What to photograph beyond the marks
- Every room, wide, from the doorway
- Inside the oven, fridge, washing machine drawer and extractor
- Sealant and grout in the bathroom
- Meter readings with the serial numbers legible — see how to take meter readings
- Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms
- The keys you were given
- The garden, shed, bin store or parking space if they are yours
Storage is part of the evidence
A photograph you cannot find is not evidence.
The usual failure is the camera roll. By the time a tenancy ends, the move-in set is buried under thousands of unrelated images, in no order, and impossible to hand over as a coherent group. People arrive at a dispute with eleven pictures because those are the ones they could find.
The test: could you, two years from now, produce a dated, organised set covering every room, and send it to someone who has never seen the property, in one go? If not, sort that out now.
Where RentSeal fits
That is exactly the problem RentSeal exists for — photos kept per tenancy, organised by room, dated as they are added, with notes attached, and exportable as one pack. You can see how it works first.
The method above works with any storage. What it does not survive is a camera roll. For what to do with the file once it matters, see what evidence to send in a deposit dispute.
This guide is general information, not legal advice.