Before-and-after photos are useless without metadata: how I archive renovation evidence

My parents had a bathroom renovated last year. The tiling started cracking within weeks, and the contractor claimed it was "post-handover damage." What settled the argument was not the photos themselves — it was the fact that we could prove when each photo was taken.

Here is the small system I set up for them, and now use for any work done on a house.

1. Shoot wide → medium → close, every time. A close-up of a crack proves nothing if you cannot show which wall it belongs to. Three shots per defect: the room, the wall, the defect with a coin for scale.

2. Never strip EXIF. Messaging apps recompress images and often drop metadata. Move originals off the phone with a cable or cloud sync that preserves EXIF (exiftool -DateTimeOriginal should return a value for every file). The timestamp inside the file is your proof of "before handover" vs "after."

3. Fold dates into filenames anyway. 2026-07-03_bathroom_north-wall_crack01.jpg survives any re-save. A tiny script does it from EXIF:

exiftool '-FileName<DateTimeOriginal' -d '%Y-%m-%d_%%f.%%e' ./renovation/

4. Keep the paper trail beside the pixels. Quotes, contracts, and the work order live in the same dated folder. A photo of a cracked tile plus the line item "waterproofing: included" is a claim; either alone is a complaint.

When we finally used a consultation desk for renovation disputes, the intake questions were almost exactly the structure above — dates, scope of contract, and dated evidence. Japanese-language guides such as リフォームトラブルの相談窓口まとめ list what those desks expect you to bring; organizing the folder this way meant the entire consultation took twenty minutes instead of a second appointment.

None of this requires special tools — a phone camera, exiftool, and the discipline to shoot three photos instead of one. The day you need it, it is worth more than any argument.