How to Photograph a Move-In or Move-Out Inspection

Move-in and move-out photos are the only documents in a tenancy that both sides can use. A landlord shoots them to establish a baseline. A tenant shoots them to avoid being charged for someone else's scuff. Done properly, the same set of images serves both — and the dispute never happens, because there is nothing left to argue about.

Done badly, the record is a folder of thirty blurry photos with no dates, no room labels, and no way to tell a pre-existing chip from a new one. That folder loses arguments for whoever is holding it.

This guide covers the shooting system, the details that get missed nearly every time, and how to pair the photos with a written condition form so the two reinforce each other.

Shoot the whole unit before you shoot any detail

Start with an orientation pass. Walk the unit in a fixed order — front door, then clockwise through every room, ending at the back — and take one wide shot from each doorway before photographing anything closely. This produces two things you will want later: a complete inventory of spaces, and a set of anchor images that locate every close-up you take afterward.

Keep the same walking order at move-out. If your move-in set opens with the entry hall and your move-out set opens with the entry hall, the two galleries sit side by side and compare themselves. That comparison is far more persuasive than any written description, and it costs nothing beyond discipline about the route.

Photograph each room from at least two opposite corners. A single wide shot from the doorway leaves the wall behind you undocumented, and the wall behind you is the one with the door, the light switches, and usually the most handling damage.

The places people forget

Almost everyone photographs walls, floors, and countertops. The charges that actually surface at move-out tend to come from somewhere else. Work through this list explicitly rather than trusting your eye to catch them:

• Inside every appliance. Open the oven and photograph the interior, the racks, and the broiler pan. Open the refrigerator, photograph the shelves and drawers, then photograph the seals and the floor underneath if the unit can be moved safely. Cleaning charges for appliance interiors are common and are trivially avoidable with a baseline photo.
• Under every sink. Cabinet floors under sinks show water staining, swelling, and prior repairs more reliably than anywhere else in a unit. Photograph the base, the trap, and any supply line corrosion.
• Window tracks and sills. Tracks accumulate debris, and sills show condensation damage and paint failure. Photograph them open, so the track interior is visible.
• Behind and beneath doors. Door bottoms scrape, hinges sag, and strike plates get chewed. Photograph each door edge and its hardware.
• Closet interiors, including rods and shelving. Shelf sag and anchor pull-out are common and easy to attribute to a tenant if no baseline exists.
• Blinds, screens, and window hardware. Individually — a single bent slat in a blind is often billed as a whole unit replacement.
• Every smoke and carbon monoxide detector. Photograph the device in place. In many jurisdictions this is a compliance item, not just a condition item.
• Existing damage, deliberately and generously. Every chip, gouge, burn, stain, cracked tile, and dead outlet. This is the single highest-value part of the pass for a tenant, and for a landlord it is what proves the unit was documented honestly.
• Utility readings and key counts. Meter faces, thermostat, and the keys laid out on a flat surface.

For any pre-existing defect, take two frames: one medium shot showing the defect in its surrounding wall or surface, and one close-up. The medium shot is what proves the location. A tight photo of a gouge with no surrounding context can be claimed to be from a different unit entirely.

Put scale in the frame for anything that could be billed

Damage charges scale with area. A scratch that is two inches long and a scratch that is two feet long look nearly identical in a phone photo taken from close range, because short-focal-length lenses flatten depth and destroy the viewer's sense of distance.

Lay a tape measure or a folding rule across anything you expect to be discussed. It converts an opinion into a measurement, and it visibly signals that the person shooting was documenting rather than assembling a case afterward.

Light the unit like it is empty, because it is

Vacant units are shot at their worst: power sometimes off, curtains gone, overhead fixtures bare, and the whole thing washed in either harsh daylight or a single yellow bulb. Phone flash makes it worse — a hard point source inches from the lens flattens surface texture, which is exactly the thing an inspection photo needs to show. A dent, a scuff, and a stain all read as vague discoloration under direct flash.

Side lighting is what makes texture visible. A portable work light placed off to one side, raking across a wall at a shallow angle, turns invisible drywall repair and surface scarring into something a photograph can actually record. It also lets you shoot closets, cabinet interiors, and basements without relying on the flash.

Pair the photos with a signed, dated condition form

Photographs establish condition. A written form establishes agreement about condition. They do different jobs and neither substitutes for the other.

A workable form lists every room down the page and, for each one, the surfaces and fixtures within it — walls, ceiling, floor, windows, doors, outlets, fixtures, appliances. Leave a condition column and a notes column. Fill it in while you are shooting, not afterward from memory, and reference photo counts where a defect is noted ("kitchen, base cabinet under sink, water staining, 3 photos").

Then get it signed and dated by both parties at the walkthrough, and give each party a copy immediately. A form signed by one side only is a statement, not an agreement. A form signed by both and held by both is very hard to dispute later.

The date problem

Everything above depends on one thing: that the photos were taken when they are claimed to have been taken. Move-in photos that could have been shot on move-out day prove nothing.

Photo metadata is weaker evidence for this than most people assume. The EXIF timestamp in a phone image is written from the device clock, and the device owner can set that clock to anything. Screenshots discard the original metadata entirely and substitute the moment of the screenshot. Many messaging apps re-encode images on send and strip the metadata along the way, so a photo forwarded through a chat thread may arrive with no reliable date at all.

Practical mitigations:

• Send originals as attachments, at full resolution. Not screenshots, not chat forwards.
• Exchange the set on the day of the walkthrough, so a dated email or delivery receipt anchors the timeline independently of the files themselves.
• Reference photo counts on the signed form, so the form and the gallery corroborate each other.
• Capture with provenance where the stakes justify it. Content Credentials — the C2PA standard — attach a cryptographic signature at the moment of capture that can be verified afterward rather than merely asserted. That is the problem EtchImage exists to solve.

Move-out: shoot it twice

Photograph the unit once when the tenant's belongings are out but before any cleaning, and again after cleaning is complete. The first set records the true condition. The second records the state in which the unit was returned. Cleaning charges are frequently disputed on exactly the gap between those two moments.

Then reshoot every wide anchor frame from the same doorway positions used at move-in. Matched pairs from identical positions are disproportionately convincing, and producing them requires only that you kept the original route.

If you are documenting damage that involves water intrusion discovered at move-out, the shooting sequence differs — see our guide on photographing water damage for an insurance claim, which covers moisture readings and cause-of-loss documentation in more depth.

Common failures

• No wide shots. Every close-up becomes unattributable to a specific room or wall.
• Skipping appliance interiors and under-sink cabinets. Two of the most commonly billed areas, and two of the most commonly undocumented.
• Photographing only defects. A record consisting entirely of damage does not establish that the rest of the unit was intact.
• Unsigned or one-sided forms. Documentation without agreement.
• Different walking order at move-out. Makes side-by-side comparison manual and slow, which means it does not get done.
• Only one party holding the record. Guarantees the dispute becomes a credibility contest.