Photographing Storage Locations Without Compromising Security

During on-site documentation sessions, we photograph storage locations to help heirs orient themselves in a room or building. The photographs never show seed phrases, PIN codes, or serial numbers visible on storage devices.

Our approach uses wide shots of rooms with arrows pointing to concealed areas — behind a specific bookshelf, inside a labeled drawer, mounted on a wall behind a painting. Close-up shots show the container type (steel capsule, paper envelope, hardware wallet sleeve) without readable text on the device.

Clients review every photograph before it enters the folder. Any image they reject is destroyed on-site. Printed photographs use matte archival paper and are glued behind numbered tabs, not stored digitally in our office.

For bank vault and safety deposit box locations, we photograph the building exterior and the vault room entrance — never the box number or key. The box number appears in typed text on a separate inventory page that the client approves independently.

This separation between visual orientation and sensitive identifiers is a practice we adopted after early projects where clients worried that a single photograph could reveal too much. The two-layer approach has become standard in every folder we bind.