How to track skin progress without guessing
Tracking a slow change badly is worse than not tracking it, because it hands you a confident answer that happens to be wrong. Here is a way of doing it that stays honest.
Photograph more often than you judge
Take a photo every day, but only draw conclusions at fixed checkpoints. Daily photos are cheap and give you a dense series; daily judgements are noise, because skin swings with sleep, salt, stress and the menstrual cycle far more than it moves with a routine. Looking at yesterday against today tells you about yesterday's dinner.
Sensible checkpoints are day 30, day 60 and day 90. Compare day one against the checkpoint, never against last week.
Record the few things that actually explain a change
You do not need a spreadsheet. What helps later is a short note whenever something changes: a new product, a stopped product, a course of medication, a holiday, an illness. When a photo series takes a turn, those notes are the only way to know why. Everything else is decoration.
Do not trust a count you did not make on the photo
Counting spots in the mirror is unreliable, because you count differently on a bad day. If you want a number, count from the photograph instead, at the checkpoint, in one sitting, across all frames. The count is then at least made under the same conditions.
What a dermatologist can actually use
A consistent photo series is one of the more useful things you can bring to an appointment. It shows the course of the problem rather than the single day you happened to book, and it shows what changed after a treatment started. Same light, same angle, dated automatically, no filters. That is worth more than a description from memory.
When to stop
Decide the stopping rule before you start, not while you are in the dip. Something like: if the day-90 comparison shows nothing, the routine goes. Written down in advance, that rule protects you from both giving up at week three and clinging to something useless for a year.
General information, not medical advice.