What happens to your photos
when you die?

It depends on whether you added a Legacy Contact. If you did, they can request access with the access key you gave them and your death certificate. Apple reviews every request. Once it approves one, the contact gets a special Legacy Contact Apple Account, your original Apple Account stops working, and Activation Lock is removed from your devices.

Apple lists what a Legacy Contact can reach: iCloud Photos, Messages in iCloud, Notes, Mail, files in iCloud Drive, Voice Memos and anything in an iCloud Backup, which can include photos and videos stored on the device. They can’t get purchased films, music or books, subscriptions, or passwords in iCloud Keychain.

Without a Legacy Contact, it’s harder. Apple says it needs legal documentation, generally a death certificate, and may also require a court order naming the person asking as the rightful inheritor of the dead person’s personal information. Only one person can make that request, and some data is end-to-end encrypted, which Apple can’t decrypt. Families can also ask Apple to delete the account. For texts and WhatsApp chats, see our guide to saving text messages from a loved one.

If you set up Google’s Inactive Account Manager, your plan runs once your account has been inactive for the length of time you chose. Up to 10 people you picked get an email with a link to download the data you chose for them, and Google checks each one with a phone number you gave for them. You can share different data with different people, and use the same tool to say whether your account should be deleted.

Without a plan, your photos sit in an account nobody can sign in to. Google’s inactive account policy lets it delete an account and its data if it has been inactive across Google for at least two years. Families can ask Google to close the account, request funds from it, or ask for data, and Google says that in certain circumstances it may provide content, after a careful review. It can’t give out passwords.

Ask for the photos before you ask for closure: once an account is closed, Google says it can’t turn over the contents later. Phone backups go sooner still: if an Android phone isn’t used for 57 days, its backed-up data is erased, though photos and videos already in Google Photos stay.

When Facebook is told that someone has died, it memorialises the account. If they chose a legacy contact, that person can pin a post to the top of the profile, respond to new friend requests, and update the profile picture and cover photo. If they gave permission, the legacy contact can also download an archive of the photos, posts and profile information they shared.

A legacy contact can’t log in as them or see their private messages, and people can choose to have their account permanently deleted after death instead. That comes from Meta’s announcement of the feature, last updated in 2019. Meta’s Help Centre now places memorialisation settings in Accounts Centre, under Personal details.

A phone is the hardest place of all. Apple says a device locked with a passcode is protected by passcode encryption, and it can’t help remove the passcode lock without erasing the device, which deletes the photos on it. So photos on a locked phone can only be reached if they were also backed up to an account the family can get into.

Drives, memory cards and old computers don’t usually have that problem, but someone has to know they exist, and they don’t last forever. The Library of Congress advises checking your photos at least once a year, making new copies every five years, and putting a copy of your photo inventory with your important papers. Our guide to backing up family photos sets out the 3-2-1 rule.

Access routes take paperwork and time. The simplest protection is copies the family can already open.

Photos like this one, of Ancestorii’s founder in July 2010, can’t be taken again. They belong where the whole family can see them, not inside one account.

Ancestorii is built around a family space rather than one person’s account. Everyone you invite to My Family can see everything in it, so the photos you add to the shared Library, albums and memories are already in front of the people who will need them.

Two details matter when someone dies. If Premium stops being paid for, nothing is deleted: everything stays viewable, and only new uploads beyond the Free limits stop. And if a member’s account is deleted while others remain in the family, their memories, Library photos and albums stay with the family; their capsules, profile images and public stories are removed. If the only member deletes their account, the whole family space goes with it, so invite at least one other person.

It doesn’t replace a Legacy Contact or Inactive Account Manager, and it isn’t a backup: iPhone HEIC photos are converted to JPEG on upload, so keep your originals in your own backups. Storage is one shared pool, 1 GB on Free and 100 GB on Premium at £3.99 a month per family, and Ancestorii is a memory-keeping service, not a legal or estate-planning one. See how the family Library works, or compare plans.