What to Photograph Before and After Every Stay

A photo takes eight seconds and settles most deposit arguments before they start. The trick is deciding what to shoot before you're standing in the flat.

Last updated: October 1, 2026

Almost every host has had the same conversation. Something is scratched, stained or missing, and nobody can say whether it happened during this stay or three guests ago. The usual answer is to start taking photographs, which helps only if you know what you're comparing. A photograph on its own proves nothing. A pair of them, taken the same way eight days apart, answers the question in about four seconds.

Key Takeaways

• A photo record is a pair, not a picture. Without a matching frame from before, a photo of damage says nothing.
• Three sets cover a stay. Arrival for the baseline, mid-stay only when something changes, departure for the comparison.
• Same frames every time, or the comparison breaks. Consistent angles beat more photographs.
• Plain light and a doorway standpoint. Telephones are fine; dark corners and flash on glass aren't.
• One folder per stay, named the same way. A record you can't find in a year isn't a record.

What these photographs are actually for

Let's be precise about the job, because the wrong expectation is why so many photo habits die in the second month.

A photo set isn't proof that a guest caused damage. Two people can look at the same scratch and disagree about when it appeared, and a photograph won't resolve that. What a photograph does is remove the guesswork for you. It tells you whether the mark you're looking at existed before the guest arrived, which is the question you're actually asking at the moment you notice it.

That has three practical uses, and none of them involve an argument.

The first is protection against your own worst instinct. When a host sees a mark after a checkout, the mind jumps to the most recent guest. Most of the time, the mark is older, and a dated set of frames tells you so before you write a message you'd have to take back.

The second is a shared reference. If a cleaner, a co-host and you all look at the same flat, you'll describe it three ways. A fixed set of frames gives everyone the same picture, which is the closest thing a small operation has to a common standard.

The third is quieter: it shows wear as wear. Floors age, grout discolours, and a sofa gets softer. Photographs taken at the same angle over a year make ordinary wear visible, so it stops being mistaken for damage and starts being something you plan to replace.

What the set won't do is settle a dispute on its own, prove who did what, or replace whatever process you run for deposits. Treat it as a record of a starting point. That's a modest job and it's worth the eight seconds.

Three sets: arrival, mid-stay, departure

The whole system is three sets, and only one of them is taken every single stay.

The arrival set. Shot before each guest arrives, on a flat that's already been cleaned and staged. This is your baseline, and it's the set that makes everything else work. Fifteen to twenty frames is plenty for a one-bedroom flat; a larger property needs more rooms, not more angles per room.

The mid-stay set. Shot only when something changes: a repair visit, a broken item, a reading you need to remember, a stain you noticed while changing a bulb. This isn't a routine. It's a dated note to yourself, and its value is that it sits between two baselines.

The departure set. Shot after the guest leaves and before the cleaner starts work. This is the set you compare against the arrival set, and it needs to be shot in the same order as the arrival set. If the cleaner gets there first, the comparison is gone — you'll be photographing a cleaned flat, which tells you nothing about how the guest left it.

The one rule that holds all three together is repetition. Pick your frames once, write them down, and shoot the same ones every time. A hundred photographs from slightly different angles are worth less than twelve from the same twelve positions, because only the second set can be lined up side by side.

Write the frame list down where the camera lives. A list of eight lines is enough: each room's four corners, the kitchen worktop, the bathroom, the meter, and the front door from the inside.

Framing and light, in plain terms

You don't need equipment. A phone camera from the last several years is more than enough, and the rules that matter are all about position and light.

Stand in the doorway, not in the middle of the room. Doorways give you a straight-on view of two walls at once and a natural frame around the shot. Walk around the room and the angles drift, which is the single most common reason two sets can't be compared.

Shoot the four corners, plus the thing most likely to be damaged. Corners catch marks on walls, scuffs on floors and damage to furniture edges. The extra frame should be the surface you'd worry about: a worktop, a table, a TV screen.

Include one reference point. A window, a door or a fixed piece of furniture gives anyone the ability to line up two frames. Without it, a before-and-after pair is two pictures of similar-looking rooms.

Turn the lights on and open the curtains. Interior photographs fail in low light far more often than they fail for any other reason. A well-lit ordinary frame beats a dark clever one every time.

Move sideways for glass. Mirrors, windows and glossy screens will reflect your flash. Step to one side and shoot at an angle, or turn the flash off and use the room light.

Get close for a reading, back for a position. A meter needs a close frame you can read, and a wider frame showing which cupboard it's in. Take both.

Leave people out of the frame. Photograph the space, not the guest. No guests, no guests' belongings, no suitcases or clothes in shot. A frame that includes a person is a frame you'll hesitate to use, and hesitation is how a photo habit stops.

Storing them so you can find the right one in a year

A photo set is only as useful as the moment you can find it, and that moment always arrives long after you've forgotten the shoot.

Name every folder the same way: the property, then the date, then the guest's booking reference if you have it. Searchable names are worth more than tidy albums, because the day you need them, you'll be typing a date rather than browsing.

Keep the frames inside in the same order as your written list, and keep the filenames consistent. When arrival and departure follow the same sequence, comparing them is a matter of flicking rather than hunting.

Then store them somewhere that isn't the phone in your pocket. One place, not three. A folder that lives only on a handset gets lost with the handset, and two half-archives are worse than one complete one.

Set a rolling window you'll actually keep. Twelve months is plenty for most hosts, and thinning the archive once a year keeps it quick to search. Keep anything unresolved, and delete the rest without ceremony.

Two small pieces of housekeeping make the set cheaper to start. When you set up a property at localsbnb.com, your listing data can come across from Airbnb — the title, the photos, the base capacity and the calendar structure — so your first frame list isn't built from nothing. And when you record the check-out in LOCALSBNB, the software shows you the guest and the dates first, and nothing runs until you approve it. Those actions apply to overseas properties, while China properties stay read-only, so the departure record sits beside the booking rather than in a separate notebook. Your photos and your record end up describing the same event.

Do this for three stays and it stops feeling like admin. Do it for ten and you'll wonder how you ever answered the question without it.

FAQ

Do I need to photograph every stay, or only ones I'm worried about?

Every stay. A baseline is only useful if it always exists, and you can't predict which booking will produce the question. The set takes about ten minutes once your frame list is written, which is roughly the time you'd spend trying to remember.

How many photographs should one set contain?

Enough to cover every room from a fixed position and nothing more. For a one-bedroom flat that's usually fifteen to twenty. Beyond that you're adding angles rather than information, and a long set is one you'll stop shooting.

What if the guest is still inside when I need the departure set?

Wait, or shoot only what you can shoot without them. The departure set belongs after they leave and before the cleaner starts. If you can't get that window, take a partial set and note the gap rather than photographing a space with people in it.

A photo record is one of the cheapest habits in hosting and one of the first to be dropped, because nothing about it feels urgent until the day it does. Shoot the same frames, in the same order, before and after every stay, and keep them where you can find them by date. That's the whole system. Hosts who run their stays through localsbnb.com have the booking dates and the departure record in the same place, so matching a pair of photographs to the right guest takes a search rather than a memory.

---

This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal, tax or platform policy advice. Photo practices, deposit rules and platform terms differ by place and change over time; check the current terms of each platform you use and the requirements that apply where the property sits.