Photo vs Video vs Spreadsheet: The Best Way to Document Your Home

There are three common ways to document your home for insurance: a spreadsheet, a set of photos, or a video walkthrough. They are not equal. Two of them are abandoned by most people who start, usually for the same reason: they are too much work. Here is an honest comparison so you can pick the one you will actually finish.

For the full process whichever method you choose, see our complete guide to creating a home inventory.

Key takeaways

• The best method is the one you will actually complete.
• Spreadsheets are thorough but tedious, and most go stale or unfinished.
• Photos are good evidence but slow to capture and not a valued list on their own.
• A video walkthrough is the fastest to capture and the easiest to finish, especially when software turns it into a structured, valued record.

The spreadsheet

How it works: you list every item by hand, room by room, with a description and a value.

Strengths: free, flexible, and structured. If completed and kept current, it is a genuine inventory.

Weaknesses: it is genuinely tedious. Entering hundreds of rows by hand is the kind of task people start with good intentions and abandon at the first drawer. It also holds no visual proof, so at claim time you have a list but nothing to show the item existed. And it ages quickly, because updating it is just as tedious as creating it.

Verdict: reliable in theory, rarely finished in practice.

Photographing every item

How it works: you photograph each item, ideally with its serial number or receipt, and organise the images by room.

Strengths: photos are strong evidence of possession, which is exactly what a claim needs. A dated image showing an item in your home is hard to argue with.

Weaknesses: capturing them is slow. Photographing and labelling every belonging one at a time is a long job, and a folder of unlabelled images is not a searchable, valued inventory. You still need to record what each item is and what it is worth.

Verdict: excellent evidence, poor speed, incomplete on its own.

The video walkthrough

How it works: you walk through your home with your phone, announcing each room and describing what you see, pausing on anything valuable.

Strengths: it is fast, and it captures two things at once: a spoken description and visual proof of every item in frame. It also captures the long tail automatically, including the things you would never have thought to list. A typical home takes around twenty minutes.

Weaknesses: on its own, raw video is hard to search and does not give you a valued list. You cannot easily answer "what is my total" from an hour of footage. This is the gap that software closes.

Verdict: the fastest and most complete method, especially when paired with a tool that structures the result.

Why video plus software wins

The video walkthrough solves the completion problem, which is the real obstacle, because almost nobody finishes a spreadsheet. Adding software solves video's only weakness by turning the footage into a structured, categorised, valued record with a dated frame for each item. You get the speed of video, the evidence quality of photos, and the structure of a spreadsheet, without the manual work of any of them.

This is what WHIG does. You record the walkthrough, and WHIG produces the valued list, captures a dated frame per item, and flags which high-value items are worth a valuation or a serial number. The values are estimates, not professional valuations, but you end up with a complete record in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. See how WHIG works.