How To Document Property Damage Properly

By Taylor Grant, licensed public adjuster · Published July 26, 2021 · Updated September 24, 2026

Your photographs are the claim. Here is the method we use on commercial files, cut down to what a property owner can do in an afternoon with a phone.

Eight months from now, somebody who was never at your property will decide what your loss was worth. They will decide it from a file. Whatever is not in that file did not happen.

This is the part of a claim you have total control over, it costs nothing, and almost nobody does it properly.

The rules that make photographs usable

Shoot before you touch anything. Mitigation is required by your policy, but photograph first. A tarp over an unphotographed hole proves nothing.

Wide, then medium, then close - every time. A close-up of a dent is meaningless without the wide shot that establishes where on the building it is. Adjusters and appraisers need to place it.

Keep the metadata. Do not screenshot, crop, or send via anything that strips EXIF. The date, time and location embedded in the original file is what makes it evidence rather than a picture. Back the originals up somewhere that is not the phone.

Scale in the frame. A tape measure, a ruler, a coin - anything of known size next to the damage.

Light matters. Dents in metal and cracks in vinyl siding show at a low sun angle. Go out early or late and shoot along the surface, not straight at it. The same gutter that looks fine at noon is visibly dented at six.

Shoot the undamaged too. Photograph the elevations that are fine. It establishes that you did a complete walk and it protects you against "you only photographed what you wanted to."

The walk, in order

Outside, all four elevations. Same distance, corner to corner. Then each elevation in detail: siding, windows, screens, trim, doors.

Every soft metal, close up. Gutters along the run, downspouts including the elbows, fascia wrap, drip edge, roof vents, turbines, valley and chimney flashing, the AC condenser fins.

The roof - from a ladder at the eave or from someone else's photographs. Do not climb a wet roof. If a roofer or a drone has been up, get every image they took, not just the ones they chose.

Detached structures. Shed, detached garage, fence, pergola, deck, playset, solar array.

Inside, room by room. Ceilings, walls, floors, window sills. Open cabinets under sinks. Photograph water lines on walls and any staining.

Contents. Every damaged item individually, with the model number and serial plate where there is one. Receipts if you have them.

Systems. Furnace, water heater, electrical panel if water reached them.

Video the whole thing once

One continuous walk-through, narrating: the date, the address, the storm, what you are looking at as you point the camera at it. Two minutes of narrated video does something a hundred stills cannot - it establishes the sequence and continuity of the whole property on one date.

The written record nobody keeps

Open a single document the day the loss happens and keep it until the claim closes:

• Date and time of the loss, and what you observed.
• Every phone call: date, time, who you spoke to, their title, what was said, what they committed to.
• Every document sent or received, and the date.
• Every person who inspected, when, and what they did.
• Every expense, with receipts - mitigation, temporary repairs, additional living expenses, meals and lodging if you were displaced.

This log is worth more than people think. When a file is reviewed later - by a supervisor, by an appraisal panel, by the Division of Insurance, by a lawyer - a dated contemporaneous log is treated as credible in a way that a recollection is not.

The storm record

Pull the National Weather Service storm report for your county and date, note the largest reported stone size and the closest report to your address, and save the page as a PDF. Free, five minutes, and it heads off "our data shows no hail at that location."

What to do with all of it

Organize into folders by area - Roof, Elevations, Interior, Contents, Mitigation, Correspondence. Number them. When you submit a supplement or a rebuttal, reference the photograph number in the line item. A scope where every disputed item points at an image is a scope that is difficult to say no to in writing.

That is the level a supplement needs, it is the level a sworn proof of loss needs, and it is what makes the difference if the file ever goes to appraisal.

If you would rather have it documented by someone who does it professionally, that is part of what we do, and on most claims it costs you nothing up front.

Keep reading