What happens to your photos when you die?

One day you will die. Morbid, I know – but that’s precisely what makes life so precious. It’s also what draws so many people to photography. Taking photos is one of the best ways to record the moments, both big and small, of a life well lived. For decades, photos were proudly displayed in frames, kept safe in albums or just stuffed into shoeboxes under a bed. When someone died, they left their photos behind as thousands of little mementos for their loved ones to help them process their grief. 

But now most photos are kept digitally in camera rolls and cloud storage – or at best, posted to social networks. It can be hard – and even impossible – for your family and friends to keep the images you took. So, let’s look at what happens to your digital photos when you die, and what you can do to make sure your loved ones still have access to them.

What happens to your photos when you die?

What happens to the photos stored on your smartphone or in your online accounts when you die varies a little bit, but the default answer is that they are lost forever. At some point in the future they’ll be deleted as your membership expires, your credit card stops working or your accounts are deleted for inactivity. Even images stored on computers and hard drives only last for a few years. If your relatives know your password, you’ve granted them access to your accounts or they work through the required bureaucratic steps, they might be able to save your photos. But it’s not a blanket guarantee with every service. Let’s look at the specifics of some of the most popular photo storage sites.

Apple photos

Apple considers privacy to be a fundamental human right and to that end, it keeps your accounts secure even when you’re no longer around. Unless you have nominated a Legacy Contact, your relatives will need a court order to get access to your iCloud account and any photos in it. If they don’t know the password to your iPhone, any images saved on it and not uploaded to iCloud will be inaccessible. Adding a Legacy Contact makes things a lot easier. You have to nominate them while you’re still alive, but they’ll be able to access your Apple account by providing a unique code and a copy of your death certificate.

Google photos

Google keeps your data safe, even in the event of your death. In certain circumstances it may provide content like photos from an account, but it’s on a case by case basis. Google’s Inactive Account Manager allows you to nominate up to ten people to receive certain data, like your photos, after you’ve been inactive for a set period of time. This is something you have to set up before your death. If you don’t, your relatives are unlikely to be able to get access to your photos and your account may be deleted after two years of inactivity.

Facebook

Facebook has strict policies in place for when people die. Your relatives can request that your page be memorialised, which will lock your account but still leave all the photos and other content that you shared online and available for people to see. To mark a memorialised profile, the word “remembering” gets added to your profile. You can also set a legacy contact who will be able to manage your profile after you’ve passed away. They can update your profile picture, write a pinned post, and if you have the option turned on, download a copy of what you’ve shared to Facebook. They aren’t able to log in to your account or read your messages.

Instagram

Instagram allows your relatives to memorialise your account after you die. All your content will remain visible to the audience you shared it with but people will no longer be able to comment on your posts. There’s no way for your relatives to download your content. Instagram doesn’t yet offer legacy contacts, though the relevant help documents exist and are blank so it may be in the pipeline.

What happens to your other photos?

If you’ve shared photos elsewhere, the chances are your family won’t be able to get access to them unless they know your password and can log in, or they get a court order. It can be an arduous route, so it’s better to prepare your digital legacy while you still can.

How to prepare your digital legacy

If you want to leave your photos behind, it’s worth thinking about your digital legacy now. There are a few options for what you can do. The simplest is to leave a record of all your passwords. This allows your relatives to log in as you, so they’ll have full access to everything. But if this is not something you feel comfortable with, you should use the official options provided by the services you use. Set up legacy contacts, inactive account managers, and whatever other options are available with the services where you store your images. 

My favourite thing to do is use lots of shared albums. Google Photos and iCloud both allow you to create shared albums with family members and friends. My partner and I use these for everything from travel snaps to dog photos. Even if one of us passes, the other still has access to all the images in the shared albums. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some of these options are all or nothing. If your family has access to your iCloud or Google Photos, they have access to all your photos. That can be a two fold problem: they have to sort through tens of thousands of memes, screenshots, terrible photos, notes and more to find the good photos; and they might see something private that they really don’t want to see.

Printing photos to preserve memories

Of course, there is a better way than leaving tens of thousands of digital images of varying quality and meaningfulness for your family to sort through. A tried and true option that people have loved for decades: printing your most important images, either as Photo Prints to be framed or as dedicated Photo Books. By curating the images that are most important to you, you impart them with additional meaning. That isn’t just a photo of you and your kids on holiday, it’s the photo of you and your kids on holiday that you kept on your bedside table. That’s the wedding photo that had pride of place on your mantlepiece. That’s the photo album you took out every Christmas. These are the kind of things that can help people mourn and find closure with your passing. 

So, instead of worrying about the transience of digital images, the specifics of various account policies and court orders, and the whole rigamarole of sorting through tens or hundreds of thousands of pictures, you should print your most important photos. That way, you can enjoy them for (hopefully) years – and leave them behind when you pass.