How Kevin Turns Photographs Into Insurance-Ready Contents Line Items

Photographs in, a reviewed and priced inventory out. A person confirms what each item is before anything is priced, and nothing is charged until a photograph becomes a line.

Kevin Godfrey, KevinLast updated 3 October 2026

How does Kevin build a contents line item?

Photographs land in staging, software proposes which shots belong to the same item, a person confirms that grouping, and only then is the item identified, priced from a listing, classified and depreciated.

The order matters more than any single step. Grouping happens before identification, so a wide shot and a model-plate close-up become one line instead of two. Review happens before anything becomes a line, so nothing enters the claim that a person has not seen. Pricing happens after identification, because a price is only defensible once you know what the item is.

How it runs

01Photos inDrop a folder, a phone dump or a whole .zip. Nothing is a claim line yet, and nothing is charged.
02ReviewedShots of one item are proposed as one item. You confirm, merge or split before anything is priced — and a line counts against your allowance once it becomes a line, not when the photo lands.
03PricedEach line gets a price from a listing with the source kept on the row, a content class, and depreciation for its age.
04ExportedXactimate (Excel) · .xlsx in the XactContents template, or a room-by-room PDF.

Photos in

Kevin's upload screen: a drop target for photos, a folder or a .zip, with a queue showing each file, its size and its upload progress — One selection, however many photos. The queue is the whole drop, not one file at a time.

Select the whole folder and click once — a phone dump or a whole .zip works the same way, and there is no total-size cap. Re-dropping yesterday’s folder resolves to duplicates rather than doubling the claim, so a second drop appends rather than overwrites. Photographs land in staging. None of them is a claim line yet, and none of them has cost you anything.

Reviewed

Staging: ten photos grouped into six proposed photo sets, several badged two photos to one item, each with merge, note, exclude and delete controls — Ten photographs, six proposed sets. The 2 → 1 item badges are the whole rule: a set becomes at most one line, so items never outnumber photographs.

Shots taken seconds apart, in the same place, are proposed as one item. This step is deliberately pre-identification: staging shows you sets and timestamps, never a guessed item name, because a guess shown at this stage would be read as a finding. You merge sets that should be one item, split ones that should not, add a note where a photograph needs context, and exclude anything that is not contents. Excluded photographs stay on the claim — in property claims evidence is excluded from the worksheet, never deleted.

This is the moment an item counts against your allowance — not when photographs were uploaded, and not for sets you excluded. If a batch would exceed what is left, Kevin processes up to the limit and tells you exactly how many were left over, rather than failing the whole upload; the remainder stays on the claim and runs when the allowance is restored.

Priced and depreciated

Processing: a progress bar for the run, beside a live feed of items as they resolve, each showing make, model, content class and price — Items resolve one at a time, each with its make, model and class. You can leave the page; the work carries on without it.

Each item is priced against the Kevin Content Pricing Engine, from a single listing — with that listing’s link stored on the row and printed in the export. Where retail cannot price an item, the resale market can, used raw and labelled as resale so a used-market price is never read as a new-replacement one. Where neither can, the cell arrives blank and editable rather than guessed.

The content class gives the useful life; the age you enter gives the percentage. The schedule carries 31 categories and 87 sub-lines, so footwear, collectible media and major appliances are not treated as one category. Depreciation applies to the tax-inclusive line total and runs to 100%: property past its useful life shows $0.00 ACV. Furs and jewelry other than costume pieces and watches have no useful life at all and are appraisal-based; costume jewelry (10 years), watches (20) and firearms (20) are ordinary age-based lines. Those four classes are never automatically PRICED, which is a separate rule from how they depreciate.

Counts read from the live schedule on 3 October 2026. Depreciation is subject to the policy and the jurisdiction; Kevin computes a schedule, not a coverage determination.

Exported

The finished worksheet: priced, classified and depreciated contents lines with totals for replacement cost, depreciation, tax and actual cash value — The reviewed worksheet, which is also what the export is a snapshot of.

Xactimate (Excel) · .xlsx in the XactContents template, or a room-by-room PDF with photographs. Every derived cell in the spreadsheet is a computed number rather than a formula, because the importer breaks on formulas — the export is a snapshot of what the app produced, and recalculation lives in the app.

Why this is not object detection

Room-level object counting versus item-level valuation
	Object detection	Kevin
Question answered	What objects appear in this room?	What is this item, and what does it cost to replace?
Output	A count of detected objects	A priced, classified, depreciated line item
Items per photo	Many — a room photo can yield a dozen	At most one; items are always at or below photo count
Evidence kept	None beyond the detection	The listing behind the price, on the row
When unsure	Reports a guess with a confidence number	Leaves the cell blank and editable

Common questions

Does a photograph become a claim line automatically?

No. Photographs land in staging, where shots of one item are proposed as a single set. Nothing is identified, priced or counted until you have reviewed those sets and started processing — that is the step that turns them into claim items.

When does an item count against my allowance?

When a reviewed set becomes a claim item. Photographs sitting in staging cost nothing, and a photograph you exclude never becomes a line. Deleting an item afterwards does not restore the count, because the work of producing it has already been done.

What does Kevin do when the evidence is ambiguous?

It declines rather than invents. A set with no usable identification arrives with blank, editable description and price fields — a hallucinated description on a carrier-facing document is worse than a blank one. You fill it in, or re-shoot the item and run it again.

Can several photographs become one line?

Yes, and that is the normal case: a wide shot and a close-up of the model plate are one item photographed twice. Clustering proposes that grouping and you confirm it. The reverse never happens — one photograph never becomes several line items.

How is depreciation calculated?

From the content class and the age you enter, against a schedule of 31 categories and 87 sub-lines. The server computes the percentage, the dollar amount and the actual cash value; the interface only renders them. Depreciation runs to 100%, so property past its useful life shows an ACV of $0.00.

What is checked by a person rather than by software?

Grouping, ambiguous identities, unusual comparables and anything class-specific — jewelry, fine arts, firearms and furs are never auto-priced. The reviewed worksheet is also fully editable: description, quantity, age, class and price all change by hand, and the money recomputes server-side.

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