Do I need photos to win a California security deposit case?

Photos help, but they stopped being the whole ballgame in April 2025. Before that date, a lot of these cases turned into "your word against his." Now, for anything that happened after the change, a law called AB 2801 puts the burden of proving a deduction was justified on your landlord, not you, and that includes his own photo documentation.

That said, don't count on a rule shifting the burden to actually decide your case for you. With nothing documented on either side, outcomes get genuinely hard to predict, and a photograph is about as low-effort as evidence gets to produce. If you have any, bring them. If you don't, the rule change is your backup, not your only plan.