I have somewhere north of forty thousand inspection photos. I know that because I counted while writing this, not because I manage them. Most contractors I know are in the same shape. Photos in the camera roll. Photos in the job software. Photos in text threads with homeowners. Photos in an email folder. Photos on a laptop a former employee took home when he left. Asking how long to keep inspection photos means answering a harder question first, which is where they even are.
I am a contractor, not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. There is no number in this post. That is on purpose, and I will explain why.
Photos are a harder problem than video
A recording tends to have one home. Photos scatter.
A single roof produces forty images that end up in four systems within a week. Three go to the homeowner by text, which means a copy now lives on a phone you do not control. Six go into an estimate. All forty sit in the camera roll of a phone that belongs to a guy who might not work for you in eighteen months. Some get emailed to a supplier for a material match.
That scatter is what makes retention hard. If your written policy says photos are held for a set window and then removed, but nine copies of the same photo exist in places your policy has never heard of, you do not have a policy. You have a wish. The first real work is not choosing a duration. It is deciding what your system of record is and getting the photos into it, so that when a window closes it closes on something real.
Volume is the second problem. Video is expensive per minute and cheap per job, because there is one file. Photos are cheap individually and enormous in aggregate, and every one of them is a picture of somebody's property.
The honest tradeoff, at any length
However you answer how long to keep inspection photos, you are buying one set of problems and selling another.
A short window means less to protect, less to search, less to migrate when you change software, and a smaller pile of other people's houses sitting on a server. It also means that on the day somebody calls about work you did, you may have nothing to look at, and what you will have instead is your memory and an invoice.
A long window means the opposite. You keep the ability to see exactly what a slope looked like on a specific morning, which is a genuinely powerful thing when a callback comes in years later. You also keep everything else, forever: every incidental frame of an interior, every open garage, every vehicle plate, all of it needing protection the entire time. And you keep the images from the jobs you would rather forget, which is a feature and not a bug, but it surprises people.
Notice I have not put a number on short or long. That is deliberate, and it is not me being cagey.
The questions that decide how long to keep inspection photos
Some of these are for your lawyer. Some are for you and your office manager. Do not mix them up.
For counsel, licensed in the state where you work: what do my contracts and warranties require me to be able to produce, and for how long? What do my insurer and my license expect? Do photos of interiors, tenants' belongings, or occupied units carry different handling rules than a roof? If a customer asks me to delete their photos, what am I permitted to do? Does any of this change when I am a sub on a commercial job versus prime on a residential one?
For your shop: which system is the system of record, and does everything land there? Do photos and video expire together, or have I accidentally built a policy where the video goes and forty stills of the same roof stay behind? What happens to a departing employee's phone and cloud account? Are texted photos part of the record or not, and have I ever actually decided that? Who inside the company can pull up photos of a stranger's back yard, and would I be comfortable explaining that list out loud?
That last one is not a technicality. Retention length and access control are the same subject. Holding fewer photos for a shorter time reduces the size of the problem. Controlling who can open them reduces the odds it ever becomes one, which is why how inspection media gets shared matters as much here as the calendar does.
Why I will not print my own number
Because the moment I do, somebody copies it into their operations manual.
Their state is not my state. Their contracts are not my contracts. Their trade may carry obligations mine does not. And a number that came from a contractor's blog is worth exactly nothing as a defense of why you did what you did. A number that came from a lawyer who read your paperwork is a different object entirely, even if it happens to be the same number.
The other reason is that vendor defaults quietly become policy. Whatever your software ships with, somebody chose that as a reasonable starting point, not as a legal conclusion about your business. In our case the window is configurable per company precisely because there is no correct default. Media is deleted after the configured window plus a grace period, and a record that the inspection happened and that its media was removed is retained after the purge, so the archive does not simply develop unexplained holes.
Set the number with counsel. Then set it in the tool so it happens without anybody thinking about it.
Where photos live matters as much as how long
A policy that only addresses duration is half a policy. The other half is storage and access: where the images sit, whether they are encrypted, who can retrieve them, whether links to them expire, and what happens when someone leaves the company. That is the part I get asked about least and worry about most, and it is written out on our security page.
The broader framing, including how photos fit alongside footage, is in the inspection video retention overview.
One more time, because it is the whole point: this is not legal advice, and nobody can tell you from a distance that removing a given photo is fine. Get a lawyer licensed where you work to set a retention policy that covers photos in the same breath as video, write it down, and let the software enforce it. Then stop thinking about it, which is the actual benefit.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.