NearIMG

2026-09-04

Photographing storm damage for a claim — and getting 200 phone photos small enough to send

Nobody plans the photo part. The water goes down, a tarp goes on the roof, the adjuster asks for "photos of the damage" — and you discover that the two hundred pictures on your phone are a few hundred megabytes of HEIC files named IMG_4412 through IMG_4611, a third of them sideways, with nothing to tell the kitchen shots from the garage shots. The photography was the easy part. Here's what the federal agencies actually tell you to photograph before you clean up, the 60-day deadline sitting behind those photos in the standard flood policy, and how to turn a camera roll into a set you can actually send — in one pass, on your own machine, during the worst week of your year.

Why this is a September problem

The timing isn't a hunch. NOAA's National Hurricane Center publishes the climatology in plain language on its Tropical Cyclone Climatology page: the official Atlantic season runs June 1 to November 30, and "the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season is September 10, with most activity occurring between mid-August and mid-October." On the 1991–2020 climate normals, an average season produces 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes.

Korea's window is narrower and its own weather service keeps the count. The Korea Meteorological Administration's typhoon statistics page puts the 1991–2020 normal at 3.4 typhoons affecting the country per year — 1.0 in July, 1.2 in August, 0.8 in September — and, tallying every typhoon that has struck since 1951, states it outright: July, August and September account for 90% of them, with August the most frequent month, then July, then September. Whichever basin you live next to, the first week of September is the last quiet moment to work out how you would handle a hundred damage photos.

What to photograph, in FEMA's own words

FEMA repeats the same instructions after every disaster declaration, and they are more specific than most people expect. From the fact sheet Don't Wait to Clean Up or Make Repairs (July 16, 2025, issued for the Texas storms and flooding that began July 2, 2025): "Be sure to include photos or videos of the outside and inside of the building, including damaged personal property, and label them by room before you remove anything." And: "Photograph the make, model and serial number of appliances such as washers, dryers, hot water heaters, kitchen appliances, TVs and computers." The same sheet is the reason you don't have to sit in a wet house waiting for someone to arrive — residents "do not need to wait for a FEMA home inspection or flood insurance claim inspection to beginning cleaning up and making repairs." The photographs are what buys that freedom.

FEMA's separate guidance, How to Document Damages After Severe Weather Events (April 16, 2025), fills in the rest: take photos and videos of structural and personal-property damage inside and outside "before discarding items," photograph "the insides of closets and cabinets," record serial numbers of large appliances, keep receipts for anything you buy to replace or repair, and retain material samples of carpeting, wallpaper, upholstery and window treatments. State regulators say the same thing in their own words: California's Department of Insurance Residential Property Claims Guide tells consumers to list every damaged item with brand names and model numbers, "take photographs of the damage," and assemble old receipts, bills and photographs to establish the price and age of what was lost.

Read that as a file problem and three requirements fall out of it. The set has to be grouped by room. Some frames are close-ups whose entire value is that a serial number stays readable after whatever you do to them. And the set is large — a house documented the way FEMA describes is well past a hundred photos before you reach the garage.

The deadline sitting behind the photos

Photos are not the claim. The claim is a document, and in the National Flood Insurance Program's standard policy it has a hard clock. The Dwelling Form is printed in full in the Code of Federal Regulations at 44 CFR Part 61, Appendix A(1), and Article VII.G, "Requirements in Case of Loss," is a numbered list of what you must do: give prompt written notice; separate the damaged and undamaged property; "prepare an inventory of damaged property showing the quantity, description, actual cash value, and amount of loss," attaching "all bills, receipts, and related documents"; and "within 60 days after the loss, send us a proof of loss" — your signed, sworn statement of what you are claiming, carrying the date and time of loss, a brief explanation of how it happened, details of any other insurance, specifications and repair estimates, and that inventory.

Sixty days is the clock, the inventory is the document, and the photographs are the evidence that lets someone who was never in your house believe the inventory. That specific text is the federal flood policy; a homeowners, renters or condo policy — or a Korean fire and storm-and-flood policy — sets its own notice period and proof requirements, so read your own. The shape is almost always identical: prompt notice, itemized loss, evidence attached.

Two sets, one camera roll Edit copies. The originals are the record. Archive — never edited IMG_4412.HEIC IMG_4413.HEIC … IMG_4611.HEIC Full resolution EXIF date · time · GPS intact Drive + one backup copy one pass Submission set kitchen-01.jpg kitchen-02.jpg … garage-01.jpg HEIC → JPG, long edge trimmed Named by room (FEMA's rule) ZIP under the upload limit Both sets are made on your own device. Only the right-hand set is sent to the insurer.
The habit that makes the rest safe: the untouched originals stay the record, and every resize, rename and conversion happens on copies.

Where it actually breaks: the files

The format. iPhones save photos in Apple's High Efficiency format by default — the setting is Settings › Camera › Formats — so what comes off the phone is .HEIC, and a fair number of claim portals, agency upload forms and adjuster inboxes accept JPG, PNG and PDF only. That's a rejection you find out about at 11pm, not a rejection anyone warns you about in advance.

The size. Google's own help page on attaching files in Gmail puts the limit plainly: "For personal Gmail accounts, the limit is 25 MB," and beyond it "Gmail automatically removes the attachment and adds it as a Google Drive link in the email." A Drive link is something your adjuster has to be able to open and re-save; it is not the same as a file sitting in the claim record. Do the arithmetic with your own camera roll rather than a made-up average — open the folder, check the size of one photo, multiply — and the 25 MB ceiling usually turns out to be about a dozen frames. A room-by-room set of a flooded house is not a dozen frames.

The names. FEMA says to "label them by room." A phone hands you IMG_4412 through IMG_4611 in one flat run, and renaming two hundred files by hand at the kitchen table is exactly the job that gets abandoned halfway, which is how a claim ends up with an unlabelled pile that the adjuster has to interpret.

The orientation. Photos shot with the phone rotated carry their rotation as an EXIF tag rather than in the pixels, and a portal's thumbnail viewer that ignores the tag will show your damage sideways to the person deciding the claim.

One pass, on your own machine

None of this needs an upload to a stranger's photo site — and photos of the inside of your damaged home, cabinets open, are not a set most people want to hand to a free web converter. Every NearIMG tool runs in your browser on your own device; nothing is transmitted. A practical order of operations:

  1. Copy the whole camera roll into an archive folder first, and don't touch it again. That folder is your original evidence, with its capture times and GPS coordinates intact. Back it up somewhere off the damaged property. Everything below happens on copies.
  2. Work one room at a time. Drop (or paste, with Ctrl+V / Cmd+V) that room's photos into NearIMG. HEIC files decode in the browser — NearIMG carries a WASM build of libheif for exactly that — so an iPhone batch works without installing anything. Desktop takes files up to 100 MB each; phones are capped at 30 MB because they have less memory to decode into.
  3. Set the output to JPG so nothing is rejected for its container, and use Resize only where it is safe: room-wide context shots survive a trimmed long edge, while a close-up of a water heater's serial plate should stay at full resolution. Resize by exact pixels or by percentage, aspect locked, so you never distort a room.
  4. Use the quality slider with your eyes open. NearIMG re-encodes after each change and shows a measured ≈ size for every file — a real result, not a formula — so you can stop the moment the batch fits the limit you're aiming at, and check the preview before you accept a number that made a serial number unreadable.
  5. Rename in the same pass. Set a prefix and a start number and every file comes out kitchen-01.jpg, kitchen-02.jpg, zero-padded so the sort order holds. That is FEMA's "label them by room" implemented in about four seconds per room.
  6. Fix the sideways ones and crop nothing that matters. Rotate works in 90° steps and bakes the correct orientation into the pixels, so it can't be misread downstream. Crop only to remove genuinely irrelevant frame — never to tighten a shot so much that the damage loses its context in the room.
  7. Download. A batch comes back as a single ZIP, built on your device. Repeat per room; upload or attach the result.

Three things not to do to a claim photo

Don't run AI upscale on evidence. NearIMG's Resize tool has an opt-in AI upscale mode, and it is genuinely useful — for old family photos. It works by reconstructing plausible detail that was never recorded. On a photo whose job is to prove what a specific object looked like on a specific day, invented detail is the last thing you want anywhere near the file. Leave the checkbox off.

Don't "improve" the picture. The Adjust tool's brightness, contrast and saturation are for photos you're trying to make look good. A claim photo is trying to be accurate. If a room was too dark to photograph, the fix is another photo with a light on, not a brightness slider applied after the fact.

Don't let the processed copies become the only copies. Every export from any browser-based tool is a fresh encode: the JPG you download has no EXIF block, so the capture time and GPS coordinates that were in the original are not in it. That's an advantage in most of life — it's exactly why one pass through NearIMG strips camera metadata — and a liability here, where the timestamp may be part of what you're proving. Keep the archive folder, and if an adjuster asks for originals, send the originals.

The one-line version

Peak Atlantic hurricane season is September 10 (NOAA), and July through September carries 90% of the typhoons that reach Korea (KMA) — so this is the week to be ready. Photograph everything before you clean up, outside and inside, labelled by room, with make, model and serial numbers on the appliances (FEMA), because the standard flood policy wants an itemized inventory and a sworn proof of loss within 60 days of the loss (44 CFR Part 61, App. A(1)). Then archive the untouched originals, and build the submission set from copies in your browser — HEIC to JPG, sensible resize, measured file sizes against the 25 MB kind of limit, renamed by room, rotated upright, out as a ZIP — with the inside of your damaged house never being uploaded anywhere except to your own insurer.