I spent about six years handing homeowners my phone with forty photos on it and watching them nod politely. They were not calling me a liar. They just had no way to tell a cracked pipe boot from a shadow on shingle, and no particular reason to take my word for it, since I was also the guy who would be writing the invoice.
What fixed that was not a better camera. It was running the same inspection photo checklist on every property, in the same order, every time. When the order never changes, the folder explains itself, and somebody who was not standing on that roof can still follow it.
Here is the list I use. What matters is not the items so much as why each one sits where it does.
The unit is three shots, not one
Before the list, the habit that makes the list work.
Every condition you photograph gets three frames. Wide, medium, tight.
Wide establishes where on the building you are. Medium shows the condition in context with something recognizable in frame, a ridge line, a window, a downspout. Tight shows the condition itself with a scale reference in the shot, a tape, a pencil, a quarter, anything with a known size.
A tight shot on its own is worth almost nothing. A close photo of a lifted shingle could be from any house in the county, including one you drove past on the way over. The wide shot is what ties it to this address. The medium is what lets a person walk their eye from one to the other without a leap of faith. Shoot the three back to back so they land next to each other in file order.
If you take one thing from this post, take that.
The inspection photo checklist, in order
- Street-facing shot with the house number legible. This is the anchor for the whole set.
- Wide front elevation showing the full structure and the sky above it. Weather and light are visible here, and they date the visit as well as any metadata does.
- Four corner obliques, walked clockwise from the street. Each corner gives you two walls in one frame, which is how a person builds a mental model of a building.
- Each elevation flat on, one frame per wall, same distance where the lot allows it.
- Grade at each elevation. Camera down at shin height, showing where the ground meets the wall, plus every downspout discharge point.
- Roof overview from the ground, one per slope, taken from the corner obliques you already stood at.
- Roof surface once you are up, one wide per slope, shot from the same relative position on each.
- Ridge, hips, and valleys as continuous runs rather than spot shots.
- Every penetration. Pipe boots, vents, chimney, skylights, dish mounts. Wide, medium, tight, each one.
- Flashing at every wall-to-roof transition and every step condition.
- Gutters, from the ground and from the ladder, including inside the trough.
- Attic from the hatch first, then down the run, then the underside of anything you flagged from the top.
- Mechanical spaces, and any interior area directly below a roof condition you noted.
- Anything anomalous, wide, medium, tight, wherever you find it.
- Closing wide of the front elevation from the exact spot you took the first shot.
Why the order is the order
The list runs outside in, top down, general to specific. That is not an aesthetic preference. It is doing three jobs at once.
It matches how a person reads a building. Nobody starts at a nail hole. They start at the curb, and a record that starts at the curb feels like an honest walkthrough instead of a highlight reel of expensive problems.
It matches how you actually move. You walk the perimeter before you set the ladder. You set the ladder before you open the attic hatch. An order that fights your feet is an order you quietly abandon by the third house of the week.
And it front-loads the frames you are most likely to forget. Item one is the address shot because the address shot is the single most commonly missing photo in every folder I have ever inherited from another crew. The closing wide at item fifteen exists for the same reason. It forces a deliberate end and gives you a bookend that shows the set is complete instead of cut short by a dead battery.
Item fourteen is the only one that floats. Damage does not schedule itself around your sequence. Shoot it where you find it and let the surrounding frames carry the location.
Adapting it without wrecking it
This is a general property spine. Your trade changes the middle of it, not the ends.
Siding and window work pushes the weight into the walls, which is why the exterior elevation photo checklist splits each wall into its own fixed run. Roof-heavy work expands items six through eleven, and the sequencing detail for that sits in the piece on roof inspection documentation. Water inside the building follows different logic altogether, because you are tracing a path rather than surveying a surface, and that is the water intrusion photo checklist.
Repair work adds a second discipline on top of this one, holding camera positions so that before and after repair photos compare one variable instead of four.
Two rules survive every adaptation I have tried. An inspection photo checklist you reorder mid-season is not a checklist, because the whole value is in the sameness. And do not skip the establishing shots to save ninety seconds, because those are the frames that make everything after them mean anything.
Getting it home intact
A clean capture sequence dies in a camera roll running IMG_4471 through IMG_4536. Either rename before you pull out of the driveway or build the naming into how you capture, and the conventions for that are in the post on organizing inspection photos.
One more thing while you are shooting. Describe, do not conclude. "Three-inch tear in the pipe boot at the south slope vent" is a record. Language about what a condition is worth, or whether anyone ought to pay for it, is not yours to write and will not help the homeowner anyway.
Run this inspection photo checklist on the next three houses without changing a thing. By the third one your hands know it and you stop reading it, which is the point. The overhead goes to zero and the record comes out consistent regardless. If you want to see how other trades run the same spine with different middles, there are examples by trade on the use cases page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What photos should I take during a roof inspection?
Think in units of three, not one: wide enough to place it, tight enough to prove it, and something in frame for scale. Then the same units in the same order every slope, every time. Forty photographs in no order is a camera roll. The same forty in a fixed order is a record.
Does the order of inspection photos actually matter?
More than the photos do. Order is what makes a stranger able to walk the roof in their head six months later without me narrating. It is also what makes a missing shot obvious — you cannot spot a gap in a pile, only in a sequence.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.