The best evidence of liability that you might have after a car accident could be the photographs you take with your smartphone while still at the scene of the crash. While a picture is worth a thousand words, some are worth even more due to their quality and what they show. Let’s take a quick look at how you can take the best photos of your car accident to get the most out of them in terms of evidence to use in your injury claim later.
Three important tips about photographing a car accident scene:
- Enable timestamp: Before you start snapping pics of the car accident scene, check your camera app’s settings. You want to see if there is a timestamp option that you can enable. Timestamping and date stamping your digital photographs make it easier to catalog them later. It can also be used to prove that the accident happened when you said it did in the off chance that the other driver tries to deny everything.
- Review the photos immediately: As you take the pictures, look at them between shots or angles. At the least, review all of the photographs when you’re done but before you leave the scene. The last thing you want is to check the photos later and find out that the sun was ruining half of them, and your thumb was covering the lens on the other half.
- Photograph everything: There is no such thing as having too many photos of your car accident and the injuries that it caused. Pictures don’t take up much memory space on modern phones. They technically don’t take any if you are able to directly save them to cloud-based storage. With that said, start snapping away at all vehicle damage, injuries, traffic and road conditions, and weather hazards.
What to Do with Your Photos
When you are satisfied with the photos you took of your car accident, it is time to save them and back them up. Don’t depend fully on your phone’s storage. If something happens to it, or you lose your phone, then your evidence is gone.
You should make copies on alternative hard drives and devices. What some people do is that they email the pictures to themselves, possibly across several emails so there isn’t a single email that takes forever to send – or that can’t send at all. When you email a picture to yourself – you can use the same email account for the sender and the recipient – as an attachment, the email host server will also save a copy of those images.
The last thing you should do with your photos is to give a copy of them to your car accident attorney once you hire one. For convenience and security, you can save the photos on a flash drive and give that to your lawyer. We recommend you save the images as PDFs and at least one other image file type to better ensure that your attorney can open them on their computer, tablet, or phone. If your pictures need to be submitted to the court as evidence later, then your attorney will be ready to handle that step for you.
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