Guides
Presenting photographs in court as exhibits
A photograph is the one exhibit a jury can read without help, which is exactly why it punishes carelessness. Two things decide whether it works on a courtroom screen: how many pixels the image actually contains, and whether it is the right way up.
Resolution matters because a photograph is the exhibit you will zoom into. A picture that looks fine on a phone can fall apart at 300% on a wall-mounted display, and there is nothing to be done about it in the room. Orientation matters because a portrait photograph dropped into a landscape page arrives rotated, and asking a witness to tilt their head is not a good look.
The other habits are small. One photograph per page. Chronological or spatial order within an exhibit. No captions burned into the image that the other side has not seen.
Preparing the file as a PDF
Exhibit Room imports PDFs only, so photographs have to be placed into a PDF before they become exhibits. The route matters less than the settings.
On Windows, selecting the images and choosing Print with the "Microsoft Print to PDF" printer works; pick full-page, one image per sheet, and turn off "fit picture to frame" if it is cropping. On macOS, open the images in Preview, choose Print, and use the PDF menu in the print dialog; the Scale setting controls how much white space surrounds each picture. Either way, choose a page orientation that matches the photographs — landscape shots into landscape pages — or rotate the images before you build the file.
Start from the original camera file rather than a copy that has been through a messaging app, which usually recompresses it to a fraction of its original size. Do not upscale a small image to fill a page; enlarging pixels adds nothing but blur. And check what you are sharing: a PDF built from phone photographs can carry location and device data in the image, so strip that during preparation if it should not travel with the exhibit. There is more on image quality in scanning and PDF quality for exhibits.
Presenting it in Exhibit Room
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Import the PDF and name it for what it shows
Drag the file onto the exhibit list or use the file picker. Name it in terms a witness would recognize — "Stairwell, north landing, 3 May" rather than "IMG_4412" — because the name appears on screen during presentation and in the exhibit switcher.
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Give it a number and a description that records provenance
Set the exhibit number, then use the description field for who took the photograph and when. Foundation questions are easier to ask when the answer is already in front of you, and it costs nothing at preparation time.
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Mark the feature, not the photograph
Use an arrow to point at the handrail, a rectangle to bound the area in dispute, or a callout to label something a witness will name. Draw at the zoom you will present at, and keep strokes thick enough to survive a projector. One or two marks per image is usually the ceiling.
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Keep a clean copy alongside the marked one
Duplicate the exhibit and annotate only the copy, so the witness can be asked what the photograph shows before being shown what you think it shows. Annotations are stored separately in Exhibit Room and the imported image file is never modified.
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Present and zoom deliberately
Press Present, then F to fit the whole photograph so the room sees its context. Use + to enlarge the detail once the witness has confirmed what they are looking at, and the arrow keys or PageUp/PageDown to move between images inside the same exhibit. Esc leaves the fullscreen view, which behaves as described on the presentation mode page.
What to highlight and what to avoid
Highlight the thing the testimony is about, and nothing else: the crack, the missing sign, the vehicle position. If the photograph contains a scale reference — a tape measure, a person of known height, a door frame — point at it, because it answers the size question before anyone asks.
Avoid enlarging past the point where the image holds together; a blurry crop invites the argument that the jury is seeing artefacts rather than evidence. Avoid showing a run of near-identical photographs, which dilutes the one that matters. Avoid drawing over the disputed feature itself, since a jury cannot evaluate what your arrow is covering. And do not use the visual redaction overlay to hide a bystander's face in a photograph you intend to produce or file — that box is a presentation aid only; how to redact a PDF explains what to use instead.
Frequently asked questions
Can I import JPEG or PNG files directly?
No. Exhibit Room imports PDFs only, so images have to be placed into a PDF first. That is a one-step conversion on every operating system Exhibit Room runs on.
How many photographs should go in one exhibit?
As many as belong together as a set — one location on one date, for example — with one image per page and a sensible order. Splitting a single series across several numbers makes it harder to talk about.
What resolution should I aim for?
Use the original file at its native size and let the page be as large as it needs to be. As a rough guide, a photograph you expect to enlarge should be several megapixels; a screenshot of a phone gallery thumbnail will not survive a projector.
Should a photograph exhibit include a caption page?
Some teams add an index page listing each photograph, its date and its photographer. It is useful, but it makes the exhibit partly argumentative, so raise it with counsel and expect the other side to have a view.
Put a photograph on the screen the way a jury will see it
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