What to photograph before you move in Future-you says thanks.

Photographing your empty apartment on move-in day, when you just want to set up your bed and collapse, feels as tedious and unnecessary as flossing, reading the Terms of Service, or waiting in line at TSA behind someone who cannot figure out whether their laptop comes out of the bag. So most people never do it, right up until the day they move out and their landlord discovers “damage” that was there the whole time. That’s the day a few boring photos quietly turn into a few hundred dollars.

Why fifteen minutes now saves you hundreds later

Every deposit dispute eventually turns into the same argument: was that already there? Your landlord says the stain on the carpet is on you. You’re pretty sure it came with the place. Without proof, it’s your word against theirs, and they’re the one holding your money. Move-in photos are how you answer “was that already there?” with a date instead of a shrug. (If you want the full version of that fight, we wrote about whether your landlord can keep your deposit.)

What to actually photograph

You’re not making an art project. You’re making a record. Go room by room and shoot anything a landlord could later call damage, which is to say almost everything:

• Walls and ceilings: scuffs, nail holes, cracks, and any water stains, especially the brown halo that means a past leak.
• Floors and carpet: stains, burns, scratches, worn patches, and loose or lifting tiles.
• Doors and windows: locks, screens, cracked panes, sticking frames, and blinds that don’t fully close.
• Kitchen: every appliance inside and out, the countertops, the cabinets, and the cave under the sink where leaks like to hide.
• Bathroom: caulk and grout, any mold or mildew, the base of the toilet, and whether the drains actually drain.
• Anything that already looks wrong: a close-up of the problem, then a wider shot that shows which wall, which room, which apartment.

How to shoot it so it actually counts

This is exactly what RentersProof was built for. The app walks you through your place room by room, tells you what to capture in each one, and keeps every photo dated and organized so nothing gets lost and nothing gets forgotten. You’re not left trying to remember whether you got the bathroom. It asks you about the bathroom.

If you’re doing it by hand, the rules are simple. Keep your phone’s date metadata on, which it is by default, so just don’t turn it off. Then shoot wide, then close: a close-up of a scuff proves a scuff, but a close-up plus the room proves where and when. The same method works on move-out day, which is the entire point.

One honest caveat either way: photo metadata can be stripped or edited, so it’s supporting evidence, not a magic timestamp. The more you have, taken consistently on the same day, the harder it is to wave away.

Put it somewhere future-you can find it

The worst place for these photos is the same camera roll you’ll bury under four thousand vacation pictures over the next year. RentersProof keeps your move-in record in one place, dated and separate from the chaos, so it’s still there fourteen months later when you actually need it. (Doing it by hand? At least email the full set to yourself the day you take them, so there’s a dated message you can dig up.) Either way, if your landlord hands you a move-in checklist, fill it out, photograph it, and keep a copy. The goal is the same: when it’s time to move out, you can produce the entire record in about a minute.

The bottom line

Move-in day is the worst possible time to do anything carefully, which is exactly why almost nobody does. But fifteen minutes with your phone, or with an app that walks you through it, is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy. Most people skip it and hope. You can be the one who shrugs, pulls up a dated photo, and walks away with the whole deposit.