Photos

Photographs are what a home inventory is actually made of. The names and tags are an index into the pictures; when you cannot remember what something was called, the picture is the thing that answers you.

The three-photo limit#

Bins and items each hold up to three photos. Try to add a fourth and the app tells you so rather than silently dropping one.

The cap is deliberate. Storage is not the constraint: attention is. Galleries that grow without limit turn into camera rolls, and a camera roll is the exact problem the app exists to solve. Three is enough for the shots that matter:

• the container, open, from above
• what is underneath the top layer
• the label, serial plate, or the detail you will want to read later

The cover photo#

The first photo is the cover, and the cover does most of the work. It is what appears in the bins grid, in search results, and in every list where a bin appears next to other bins.

To change it, open the gallery, choose a photo, and pick Set as cover. Worth doing whenever a later photo turns out to be the more recognizable one: the first shot you took is rarely the best one for a thumbnail.

A good cover is the one you would recognize from across the room, not the one with the most detail. Detail is what the other two photos are for.

Taking photos that stay useful#

• Shoot the contents, not the container. A closed box photographs as a box, and every box looks like every other box.
• Fill the frame. A bin photographed from across the garage is a gray rectangle at thumbnail size.
• Re-shoot when things change. A cover photo showing contents that were removed two years ago is worse than none, because you will trust it.

Where photos are stored#

Photos are captured on the device and uploaded to whichever server you are signed in to. On cloud, storage is private: images are never served from a public bucket, and the apps fetch them through links that expire after a few minutes. A URL that leaks is a URL that has already stopped working.

On a self-hosted server, photos are on your own hardware, which also means their backup is your responsibility. See Your data.

Offline#

Photos taken offline are held on the device and upload on the next sync, along with everything else. The app does not wait for a connection to let you carry on, which matters, because the places worth inventorying are disproportionately garages, lofts and basements with no signal in them.