What to do with someone's Facebook account when they die

In the days after someone dies, their Facebook account is usually the last thing on your mind, and there is no reason it should be otherwise. Nothing bad happens if you leave it alone for a while. The posts and the photos stay exactly as they were.

There are a couple of things worth knowing early, though, because one of them is easier to do now than later. The first is that the account holds something worth keeping: years of their photos, their words, the small everyday posts that sound exactly like them. The second is that once Facebook is told someone has died, it can lock the account, and after that nobody can log in again. Not family, not anyone. So the simplest way to save what is inside is open to you now, while you may still have the password or the phone, and it quietly closes later.

None of this is urgent. It is only that it is easier done before the account is locked than after, and the official help pages do not tend to mention that.

Why the account won't just sit there quietly

If you do nothing at all, the account stays exactly as it was the day the person died, with whatever privacy settings they had set. That sounds harmless, and for a while it is. Then the small things start.

Then Facebook starts behaving as though nothing has happened. It emails their friends to say it is the person's birthday and nudges them to post something cheerful on the wall. It puts their face back into “people you may know”. Someone who has not heard tags them in an old holiday photo. For the people who were closest to them, these are not small things. How that lands varies. Some people take a birthday reminder in their stride, even welcome the nudge for old friends to gather and post. For others the same prompt, arriving out of nowhere on a normal day, is hard to be handed, and Facebook sends it again every year. Facebook's algorithm will continue to include someone who has died as a new friend to add in “people you may know”, pushing the connection, which is often confusing and upsetting.

There is also a real security problem. A dormant account with a known owner is exactly what scammers look for. Cloned profiles, messages sent to the friend list asking for money, photos lifted and reused. An unattended account is not a neutral thing left to rest. It is a live login that nobody is watching.

So most families end up doing something. The question is what, and in which order.

Your three choices, and what each one closes off

There are really only three things you can do with the account itself, and the trap is that two of them shut a door you might not have meant to shut.

You can memorialise it. Facebook adds the word “Remembering” before the name, freezes the profile, and stops the birthday reminders and the suggestions. Friends can still see it and post tributes. Nobody can log in. This is what Facebook does by default once it learns of a death.

You can request permanent deletion. A verified immediate family member or the person's legal representative can ask Facebook to remove the account entirely, with proof of death. Everything goes.

Or you can leave it alone, with the pings and the security risk that come with that.

Here is the catch that matters more than any of the rest. Memorialising locks login, and deleting destroys the contents. Both of them close off your access to what the person actually posted. If there is anything in that account you want to keep, the photos, the things they wrote, you want it out of Facebook before you trigger either one. Decide about the contents first. Decide about the profile second.

What a legacy contact can and cannot do

Facebook does have a proper tool for this, called a legacy contact. The problem is that it only works if the person set it up while they were alive, in their own settings, by naming someone they trusted. Most people never do. It is one of those five-minute jobs that sits on everyone's list and gets done by almost no one.

If your person did name you, you get a useful but limited set of powers once the account is memorialised. You can pin a post to the top of their profile, respond to new friend requests, change the profile and cover photo, and manage the tributes other people leave. If, and only if, they switched the option on, you can also download a copy of what they shared.

What you cannot do is just as important. You cannot log in as them. You cannot read their private messages, which Facebook keeps closed to everyone. You cannot edit or delete the things they already posted. A legacy contact is allowed to tend the memorial, not to go through the house behind it.

For most families reading this after a death rather than before one, the honest position is that no legacy contact was ever named, and that route is closed. Which brings everything back to getting the contents out yourself, while you still can.

How to get the photos and posts out before the account is locked

Facebook has a feature called “Download your information”. It bundles up the posts, photos, comments and profile details into a single archive you can save to a computer. It is the most complete copy you can get, and it is the thing worth doing first.

If you have access to the account, because you have the password or an unlocked phone in the immediate aftermath, this is the moment to use it. Go into the settings and look for “Download your information” (Facebook keeps moving where it lives, but the search box in settings will find it). You choose what to include, you choose a date range or the whole history, and you choose the media quality. Set the quality to high, or the photos come back small. The archive takes time to build, sometimes hours, and then Facebook gives you a download link that expires after a few days, so save it promptly.

There is a format choice that catches people out. You will be offered HTML or JSON. Choose HTML unless you have a specific technical reason not to. HTML files open in any web browser and are readable by a human. JSON is for software, and a folder of JSON will mean nothing to most people.

If you do not have account access but you were named as a legacy contact with the download permission turned on, you can pull the same archive from the memorialised account.

If you have no access and no legacy contact, you are not quite out of options, but the one that remains is slow. Facebook keeps a special request form for a verified immediate family member or the executor of the estate, and alongside memorialising or removing the account, it can be used to ask for content from it. Facebook treats that as a serious data request. It usually wants estate documentation, often a court order, it weighs the privacy of everyone else who appears in the person's photos and messages, and it can say no. It is worth knowing the route exists. It is the legal road, not the five-minute one.

What no route gives you is the login. Facebook does not release passwords, and once an account is memorialised even the right password will not get you in. That is the whole reason the in-life download, while you still hold the phone or the password, is worth so much.

The single most useful thing in this whole article: get the export before you ask Facebook to memorialise the account. Memorialising locks the login, and the simplest way to download the archive needs you to be logged in.

What the download actually gives you, and why it is overwhelming

Here is the part nobody warns you about. The archive Facebook hands back is a sprawling, confusing thing. It arrives as a zip file containing hundreds or thousands of separate files in nested folders. Photos in one place, posts in another, comments somewhere else again. It is technically a complete record and practically very hard to just sit down and read.

It is also mostly noise. When we built the Facebook import into Northstar, the first real export we ran through it had 356 posts in it. Once we stripped out the duplicates, the reshared news articles, the “is now friends with” entries and the pages they had liked, it came down to 126 things that were actually theirs. The signal-to-noise was worse than four to one.

That number is the real lesson. You almost certainly do not want all of it. What you want are the few hundred things that are genuinely the person: the status updates in their own voice, the photos they took and chose to share, the captions that sound like them. Those are buried inside thousands of files that are not, and going through it by hand, file by file, on top of everything else you are dealing with, is more than most people can face.

What you can do with the export once you have it

This is the reason we built a Facebook import into Northstar Keep. You upload the zip exactly as Facebook gives it to you, with no need to unzip it or understand its folder structure, and it reads the export for you. It pulls out the posts and the photos, sets the noise aside, and lays out what is left so you can read it calmly and choose what to keep on a memorial page for the person. The things you keep sit somewhere private, that belongs to the family, rather than to a platform that was always going to do its own thing with them. And anyone you invite can add their own memories alongside yours without needing a Facebook account, or any account at all.

If you are thinking more broadly about gathering what is scattered across phones, inboxes and other people's albums, the wider question of how to gather memories from family and friends is worth reading next.

The profile was never really the point. It was a holding pen, owned by a company, running on rules you did not write. What is worth saving was always the words and the pictures inside it. Get those somewhere safe and they stop being at the mercy of a setting that can change, an account that can be locked, or a reminder that goes out on the wrong morning. Then you can do the thing Facebook never quite let you do, which is simply keep them.