Colorado tenants can now ask for your move-out photos: what to send, and what it has to show

Until this year, a Colorado landlord who kept part of a deposit owed the tenant a written list of reasons. That list is still required. What changed on 1 January 2026 is that the tenant can now ask for what is behind it. That includes the photographs.

That turns your move-out photos from something you might show a judge into something you may have to hand over within two weeks, to the person most motivated to pick them apart. This article is about what that means for the files themselves. It covers Colorado only. Other states in the region set their own deadlines, and we have not covered them here.

What the statute says

The change is House Bill 25-1249, signed on 3 June 2025 and in force from 1 January 2026. It amends the deposit section of Colorado’s landlord-tenant law, C.R.S. 38-12-103. We read the session-law text, not a summary. The parts that matter here:

• Thirty days. The deadline to return the deposit, or to send the written statement of reasons, went from “one month” to thirty days after the lease ends or the premises are surrendered. A lease can still extend it, to no more than sixty days.
• Documentation on request. The new subsection (8) says that on a written request from the tenant, the landlord “shall provide documentation in the landlord’s possession or control, including photographs, inspection forms or reports, receipts, invoices, or estimates, that is relevant to the retention”, within fourteen days of the request. The sentence itself is awkwardly built, and a lawyer should read it for your situation. Its subject is not in doubt: photographs are named first.
• Missing it costs the whole deduction. A landlord who fails to provide the statement and the documentation on time is treated as having wrongfully withheld the deposit, and forfeits the right to keep any of it.
• Damage that was there before does not count. A deposit cannot be kept for damage or a defective condition “that preexisted the tenancy”.
• The burden is yours. In court, the landlord has to prove the withholding was not wrongful and that they followed the section. They also have to prove the amount of actual damages. Keeping 125% or more of the actual damages is presumed to be excessive.
• Walk-through on request. Either side can ask for a walk-through inspection before the lease ends, in person or by video call, after the tenant has had the chance to move furniture out.
• Wrongful withholding can cost three times the amount withheld, plus attorney fees. The tenant has to send a demand and give seven days’ notice before suing.

Your photos will be read by someone looking for a reason

Before this law, a landlord’s photos mostly came out at a hearing, if the dispute got that far. Now a tenant who disagrees with a deduction can have them in hand within two weeks. They can open the files, look at the dates, and drop them into any checker they like, including ours. Two kinds of photo come off badly from that.

Photos that cannot say when they were taken

The law now puts the question of pre-existing damage in writing. Most of the time, the answer rests on your move-in photos. A move-in photo that went through a text message, a chat app or a portal that rebuilds pictures often arrives with no camera clock in it. Then the only evidence of when it was taken is your word and the date on an email. That is not proof it is fake. It is a photo that cannot vouch for itself, at the moment you need it to. The article on getting original files covers which routes keep that record and which destroy it. The same routes apply to your own staff.

Photos someone tidied up

Phones now offer one-tap AI edits: erase a cable, brighten a dark room, clean up a smudge. Some of those tools write a note into the file saying generative AI was used. Our checker reads that note and shows AI Edited. A leasing agent who “cleaned up” a move-out photo so the stain showed better has handed the tenant a file that says, in its own words, it was altered with AI. The stain may be perfectly real. It will still be an argument you did not need to have. What an AI-edited photo records goes into this.

What to send, and how

1. Send the photo files themselves. Attach the originals from the phone that took them. Do not send screenshots or a PDF with the pictures pasted in. We tested a PDF: the camera data inside the photo was gone. If you only send the PDF, your photos can no longer show when they were taken.
2. Send the move-in photos too. The law says a deposit cannot be kept for damage that was already there. The move-in photos show which damage was new.
3. Never edit the original. If you want to circle the damage or add an arrow, do it on a copy, and send both. The marked-up copy explains the photo. The untouched one is the evidence.
4. Keep a record of exactly what you sent. If the dispute goes on, you want to be able to show that the file you bring to court is the file you gave the tenant. A fingerprint of the file, called a SHA-256, does that. Change one pixel and it changes completely.
5. Check them before you send them. It takes a minute to see what each file says about itself. It is much better to learn that a move-in photo lost its date when you still have time to find a better copy than when the tenant points it out.

One more habit: put both deadlines in a calendar the day the tenant hands the keys back: thirty days for the statement (or what your lease says, up to sixty), and fourteen days from any written request for the documents.

The limits, stated plainly

• This is not legal advice. It is one reading of one state’s statute, taken from the session law as signed. Subsection (8) in particular is awkwardly worded, so have your lawyer or your association confirm how it applies to your leases.
• A photo with an intact camera record is corroboration, not proof. Camera data can be edited, and a real photo can still be of the wrong unit or taken on the wrong day.
• A photo with no camera record is not a fake. Screenshots, chat apps and many portals remove it from genuine photos every day.
• Our checker does not judge a picture by looking at it, and gives no confidence score. It reads what is in the file, in your browser, and uploads nothing.

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ImposterShield reads the evidence inside image and video files. It runs in your browser and uploads nothing. If a file has been stripped, it says so. If it has not read a file, it says that too.