Photographing Damage for a Claim

The single most valuable hour after storm damage is spent with a camera, before anything is cleaned up, moved, or repaired. Almost everyone under-documents, and the gap between adequate and thorough documentation is frequently the gap between a paid claim and a disputed one.

The order that matters most

Photograph before you touch anything. This is the rule people break, understandably, because the instinct in a flooding room is to move belongings and put down towels.

Where safety permits, spend five minutes photographing first. Water on the floor, the ceiling mid-drip, the position of damaged items where they fell. Once cleaned, that evidence does not exist and you are describing it rather than showing it.

The exception is genuine safety: electrical hazards and bulging ceilings get addressed immediately regardless.

The three-distance method

Adjusters need to understand both what is damaged and where it sits in the building. Shoot every damaged area three times.

Wide. The whole room or the whole elevation, showing context. This establishes location and lets someone who was not there orient themselves.

Medium. The damaged area and its immediate surroundings, showing the relationship between the damage and nearby features — a window, a light fixture, the corner of the room.

Close. The damage itself, in focus and well lit. Use a flash or a lamp for interior shots, since damp ceilings photograph poorly in dim light.

Include something for scale in the close shots — a tape measure is ideal, a coin or a hand works. Scale is one of the most common omissions and it materially affects how damage reads to someone reviewing images.

What to photograph beyond the obvious

Interior: ceilings and walls, staining, standing water, damaged flooring, affected furniture and belongings individually, contents of closets or storage in the affected area, and the inside of the attic if it can be reached safely.

Exterior: every elevation of the house even where undamaged, the roof from multiple ground positions, debris on the ground including shingles and branches, gutters pulled loose, damaged siding or trim, and the trees or structures involved if something struck the house.

Wider context: neighbouring properties showing similar damage, downed limbs on the street, and anything establishing that a significant weather event occurred here rather than merely somewhere in the region.

Video is underused and worth doing. Walk through narrating what you are seeing and when. It captures spatial relationships stills miss and provides a natural timestamped record.

Metadata and timing

Digital photographs carry embedded date and time information, which is exactly why originals matter. Do not crop, edit, or run images through filters — send originals and keep them. Screenshots and re-saved copies can strip metadata.

Separately, write down the date and approximate time of the storm itself. Carriers evaluate claims against recorded weather data, and being able to state that damage was documented on a specific date coinciding with a recorded wind event connects the two directly. Publicly available weather records for the date and location are worth saving alongside your photographs.

Keep the physical evidence

Do not throw away the shingles that came off, the section of ruined carpet, or the damaged belongings until the adjuster has inspected them or explicitly released them. Photograph them, bag them, and set them aside.

Physical evidence is difficult to dispute and easy to lose, and a shingle with a fresh crease and clean fracture surfaces tells a story that a photograph of an empty roof section cannot.

Document the mitigation too

Most policies obligate you to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage. That obligation cuts both ways: reasonable emergency costs are typically reimbursable.

So photograph the tarp going on and in place. Keep receipts for tarps, lumber, fasteners, fans, and dehumidifiers. If you did the work yourself, log your hours and what you did. If you hired emergency services, keep the invoice and the scope description.

Organisation, which sounds trivial and is not

A folder of two hundred unsorted images is genuinely harder to evaluate than sixty organised ones, and an adjuster working through a disorganised submission is more likely to miss items.

Group by location — by room, by roof slope, by elevation. Name folders plainly. Write a short index listing each area and what was damaged there. Keep a simple chronological log: storm date, date documented, date each contractor visited, date the tarp went on, dates of every call and what was said.

Back everything up somewhere off the property. Homes with roof damage sometimes have subsequent water damage, and a laptop in the affected room is not a backup.

The habit worth forming before anything happens

Photograph your roof, your attic, and your exterior elevations once a year on a clear day, and keep the images. It takes fifteen minutes.

The value is in what it establishes: the condition of the roof before the event. The most common reason storm claims get reduced or denied is a determination that damage was pre-existing. A dated set of photographs from six months earlier showing an intact roof is the most direct possible answer to that argument, and virtually nobody has one.