The move-out photo checklist: what to shoot before anyone cleans

The before photos are the ones you cannot go back for. Once the unit is clean, the evidence of what it looked like at handover is gone, and no amount of care afterwards recovers it. So this article is deliberately narrow: what to photograph in the window between the tenant leaving and the cleaner arriving.

The pattern for every room

Two kinds of shot, in this order. A wide one from the doorway that establishes the whole room and makes clear which room it is. Then close-ups of anything you might charge for. The wide shot is what stops a close-up of a stain from being an argument about which unit it was taken in.

Shoot more than you think you need. Photographs are free; a disputed deduction is not.

Room by room

• Entry and hallways — floors, baseboards, the back of the front door, closet interiors, light switches.
• Kitchen — inside the oven, inside the fridge with the door held open, under the sink, inside every cabinet and drawer, the range hood filter, countertops, and the floor along the toe kick where grease collects.
• Bathrooms — inside the toilet bowl, the base of the toilet, grout and caulk lines, the inside of the shower door or the curtain rod, the exhaust fan cover, under the sink, and the medicine cabinet.
• Bedrooms and living areas — carpet or flooring across the whole span, closet floors and shelves, wall corners near the ceiling, and each window sill and track.
• Laundry — behind and under the machines if they are yours, the dryer vent, the floor beneath.
• Exterior and shared areas — patio, balcony, garage floor, storage areas, and anything the lease made the tenant responsible for.

The five most commonly missed

1. Inside the appliances. A wide kitchen shot shows a closed oven door. It does not show the oven.
2. Window tracks and sills. Small, always dirty, and almost never photographed.
3. Ceiling corners. Where cobwebs and smoke staining live, and where a wide shot taken at eye height cuts off.
4. Closet floors. Every closet, including the ones that look empty.
5. The meter or a dated newspaper. Not required by anything — but a photo that fixes the date on its own is a useful thing to have at the front of a set.

Timestamps, and why your phone's clock is the weak link

A photo's value here is partly about *when* it was taken, and a phone's clock is set by its owner. EXIF data can be edited by anyone with a free app, which makes it a weaker record than most people assume. It is worth capturing in a way that records the time against something other than the device in your hand.

That is what our free move-out documentation tool does — it stamps each photo using our server's clock and notes when it had to fall back to the device's, so the sequence is harder to dispute later. It runs in a phone browser, needs no account to start, and keeps the images on your device.

Then do it again after the work

The after photos are the other half of the requirement, and they are easy to forget once the unit looks good and you are focused on listing it. Shoot the same rooms from the same doorways — matched pairs are far easier for a tenant to read, and far harder to argue with, than two unrelated sets.

If you would rather not be the one standing in an empty unit at 8am with a phone, we do move-out cleans across the Bay Area and can book the crew for after your before photos are done.