Every checklist in this cluster was written for a job where the photographs are the record. You climb, you shoot, you come down, and what you did not capture did not happen. The exterior elevation checklist is that discipline in its purest form.
A live walkthrough changes the arithmetic, and not in the direction most people assume.
The first reaction I hear is "the video covers it, so I can stop photographing." The second, about a week later, is the opposite: the inspector shoots everything he used to, narrates the whole walk on top of it, and the job takes twenty minutes longer than it did before.
Neither is right. The list does not get longer or disappear. It changes shape.
Why a recording is not a substitute for a still
Start with the mechanical reason, because it decides everything after it.
The live stream and the saved recording are an adaptive video encode. Quality moves with the connection. The viewer page even labels itself HD or Reduced quality, so nobody is quietly shown a soft picture and left wondering why the granule loss is hard to make out. On a strong signal the recording is genuinely useful evidence. On a marginal one it is a clear account of what happened and a poor account of fine detail.
A still captured during the inspection is a different artifact. InspectStream captures full-resolution stills from the active camera while the walkthrough continues, and those images stay attached to the inspection instead of landing in somebody's camera roll.
That is the whole distinction. The video is the narrative. The stills are the detail. Detail is what somebody zooms into fourteen months later.
So the working rule is short. If a reader will need to look closely at it, photograph it. If they need to understand where it sits and how it relates to what surrounds it, the video already did that better than a photo can.
The inspection photo checklist gets shorter, not longer
Three categories come off.
Orientation shots. The wide frame of the elevation, the view from the top of the ladder, the pan across the slope. These existed to tell whoever opens the file where they are. The recording does that continuously and better, with the inspector saying the direction out loud as he moves. You do not need eleven establishing frames.
Sequence shots. Photos taken purely to prove order — this before that, the tarp going on, the panel coming off. A recording is a sequence by construction, with a clock running through it.
Duplicate angles of one defect. Shooting the same split from four positions was always a hedge against three of them being unusable. The walkthrough carries the other angles, because you moved while you were describing it.
Two categories go up.
Close detail. Anything where the answer is in the texture: granule loss, a hairline separation at a seam, corrosion under flashing, the underside of a fastener, a nail that backed out. Get close, hold still, take the still.
Anything with writing on it. Model plates, date stamps, bundle wrappers, permit stickers, serial numbers. Text is the single thing a compressed video handles worst, and it is disproportionately what somebody needs later.
The three I never skip, regardless
The first frame of the defect, before I say anything about it. Narration is interpretation. A still taken before you start explaining is the condition on its own terms, and if your read of it is ever questioned, that photograph is the part of the record that has no opinion in it.
The overall of anything you are going to recommend replacing. Not for context — for scale. A close-up of a failed boot and a still that shows the boot in relation to the ridge are answering two different future questions.
Whatever you would have photographed if the customer had not been watching. This one matters more than it sounds. A live audience quietly pushes an inspector toward showing rather than recording, and the shots that get dropped are the dull ones nobody asks about. Photographing what is not wrong makes the longer case for keeping them.
Say the photo out loud when you take it
One habit that costs nothing and pays for itself.
When you capture a still, say what it is. "That is the pipe boot on the south slope, cracked at the base." One sentence, in the recording, at the same moment as the shutter.
You now have a timestamped audio label for a photograph, sitting inside the same record as the photograph. Nobody has to reconstruct, six months later, which of eleven brown-and-grey images was the one being discussed. The video indexes the stills, which is a job nobody had a good answer for when the file was a folder of photographs and a naming convention.
It also solves the problem that made before and after photo pairs fiddly to keep straight, because the pairing is stated rather than implied by filename order.
What this looks like on a real walk
Roughly: fewer photographs, taken more deliberately, with a sentence attached to each.
An inspector who used to come off a roof with sixty images will come off with twenty-five and a recording, and the twenty-five will be better than any twenty-five of the sixty. The wide shots he stopped taking are the ones nobody ever opened.
The one thing not to do is treat the recording as permission to stop looking carefully. A camera pointed at a slope while you talk is not the same act as deciding a specific thing is worth a specific photograph. The checklist exists to force that decision, and it still does — it just has fewer lines on it now.
The capture step, and where the stills and the recording end up afterwards, is laid out on how it works.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.