A photograph is the cheapest field in an inventory. It takes two seconds, it captures everything you decided not to type, and it is the only record that still answers questions you had not thought of when you made it.
Three photographs per wine
The front label identifies the wine. The back label carries the things you will want later and would never type: importer, alcohol level, bottling details, the cuvee name in small print. For anything with age, add a third photograph of the neck and capsule, which records the fill level and any seepage at the moment the bottle entered your care.
That third one feels unnecessary until the day it is not. It is the difference between a condition question you can answer and one you can only guess at, whether you are judging an inherited bottle or explaining a bottle to a buyer.
Light, angle and focus
Even indirect light beats bright direct light, which blows out foil and gold lettering. Daylight from a window with the bottle turned away from the glare works better than any flash. Fill the frame with the label rather than photographing the whole bottle, and hold the camera parallel to the label so the text is not distorted.
Dark labels and embossed text are the hard cases. Tilt the bottle slightly to catch light across the lettering rather than straight at it. If the text recognition in your app struggles, the scanning guide covers what makes a label readable to software rather than only to you.
One photograph per shelf
Individual labels prove what a wine is. A wide shot of the whole shelf proves how many there were and where they lived. It takes one second per rack and it is the single most useful photograph in an insurance file, as the insurance guide explains.
Repeat the shelf photographs after any large delivery or reorganization, and keep the old ones. A dated series of shelf photographs is a history of the collection that costs nothing to maintain.
Front label, frame filled: Back label, including importer and alcohol: Neck and capsule, for older bottles: Wide shot of the shelf or rack: Light: indirect, no flash: Date of the shelf series: Backup copy stored off the device:
Keep the photographs with the wine, not in a camera roll
Ten thousand photographs in a phone gallery is not a record, because nothing connects a picture to the bottle it describes. Attach the photograph to the wine record so that finding the wine finds the picture.
Then make sure the record leaves the device. Photographs are the largest part of an inventory and the part most often lost with a phone, which is what the backup guide is for.
When you are photographing to sell or to move
Buyers and shippers ask for the same three shots plus the shelf, taken recently and unedited. Do not crop out a damaged label or brighten a stained capsule, because the condition is the thing being asked about, and the photograph loses its value the moment it stops being evidence.
The same applies when you receive wine. Photograph anything that does not match the order before it goes into a rack, as the receiving checklist covers, while the packaging is still there.