“Send me the original”: getting a tenant’s photo with the evidence still in it

Every article on this site ends with the same advice: ask for the original file. That advice is only as good as the route the file takes to reach you.

Most photos a manager receives have already been through something that rebuilt them on the way: a messaging app, a resident portal, a screenshot. A rebuilt photo reads Can’t Verify whether the tenant is honest or not. This piece covers the practical side: which routes keep the evidence, which ones throw it away, and a five-minute test that tells you what your own inbox does before a dispute depends on it.

What “the original” means

A phone photo carries a block of data the camera writes into the file: the phone’s make and model, the exposure settings, the time on the camera clock and, on newer phones, a note if AI was used to edit it. That block is what our checker reads.

The picture can make a trip perfectly while that block is thrown away. What arrives looks identical and proves nothing. So “original” does not mean full resolution, or not blurry. It means the file as the phone wrote it, or a copy that kept that block.

Routes that keep it

• Email, as an attachment. Craig Ball, a lawyer who writes about electronic evidence, emailed an iPhone photo to Gmail as an attachment. It arrived converted from HEIC to JPEG with its camera data intact, and a shrunk copy kept it too. He tested this in 2020, and phones change, which is one reason for the test below. This is why our standard request says email.
• WhatsApp, but only as a Document. WhatsApp’s ordinary photo button compresses the picture and strips the data. Attaching the photo as a document sends the file as it is: tap + (or the paperclip), then Document, then choose the photo. Amnesty’s Citizen Evidence Lab gives investigators exactly this advice. WhatsApp’s HD option is not the same thing, and it still compresses.
• iPhone to iPhone. 9to5Mac found that Apple’s own AI-edit label survived AirDrop and iMessage. That suggests the rest of the camera data does too, but we have not tested it ourselves.

Routes that destroy it

• A screenshot. It is a new picture of a screen. The camera data belonged to the old file and does not come along.
• WhatsApp’s normal photo button, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook itself.
• Right-clicking a picture in an email and choosing “Save image as”. In Ball’s test, the attachment kept everything, and the same photo saved from the body of the email kept nothing. That one is on your side of the process: use the attachment’s download button.
• Texts between iPhone and Android. Google Messages compresses pictures before sending them and caps them at 2,048 pixels tall. We have not tested what data survives that, so treat it as unreliable.

The route we cannot vouch for: your portal

Many managers collect move-out photos through a resident portal or an inspection app. Some keep an uploaded file exactly as it arrived. Others shrink it to save storage, and shrinking usually means rebuilding. We have not tested any portal or inspection app, and we are not going to guess which does what.

You do not have to guess either.

The five-minute test

Before the next dispute:

1. Take a photo of your desk with your own phone.
2. Send it to yourself the way you ask tenants to send theirs: the address in your move-out letter, the portal upload, the text line.
3. Download what arrives using the download button, not by right-clicking the picture.
4. Drop it on the checker.

If it says Camera Original with your phone’s name and the right time, that route works. If it says Can’t Verify, that route strips every photo that goes through it, and a tenant’s photo that arrives that way tells you nothing about the tenant. Better to learn that now than from the other side at a hearing.

Then do it once more with a phone that is not yours, an Android if you carry an iPhone, or the other way round. We have not tested Android email apps, and that second run covers it.

The HEIC wrinkle

iPhones save photos as HEIC by default. Apple says that when a photo is shared by AirDrop, Messages or email and the receiving side does not support the format, it “might automatically be shared in a more compatible format, such as JPEG”. Ball’s arrived as a JPEG.

If a file reaches you still ending in .HEIC, our checker says Not Read. It does not read HEIC yet, and it says so rather than implying it looked. Ask for the photo again by email from the phone’s photo app.

What to put in writing

Words you can paste into your move-out instructions:

Please send your photos as email attachments from your phone’s photo app to [address]. Please don’t send screenshots, and don’t use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp’s photo button. If you use WhatsApp, attach the photos as a Document instead. Keep the originals on your phone until your deposit is settled.

The last sentence matters. The copy on the tenant’s phone is the best evidence either side has, and it protects the tenant as much as it protects you. For what to do with the file once it arrives, see checking the photos a tenant sends back.

What this does not do

An original file is not a true photo. Camera data can be edited by anyone who knows how. A camera original shows what the file says about itself, not that the scene in it is honest.

A stripped file is not a lie. Most people send photos the easy way. Can’t Verify is a reason to ask again, never an accusation.

Most of the routes above are other people’s tests, not ours. We have run our own checker, not every phone and app. Phone and app makers change this behaviour in updates, so run the five-minute test again after a big phone update.

It does not give you a confidence score. We tried twice to build a classifier that judges a picture by its pixels. The second attempt looked at eighteen ordinary photographs and called seventeen of them fake. It is switched off. Getting the real file is worth more than any guess about a stripped one.

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ImposterShield reads the evidence inside image files. It runs in your browser and uploads nothing. If a file has been stripped, it says so. That is the product working, not failing.