What to do with someone's photos and videos after they die

When someone dies, you can become the keeper of their photographs and videos almost by accident. Nobody hands you the job. You just realise, at some point, that their phone is in a drawer, their account is still logged in on the tablet, there is a shoebox of prints at their mother's house, and a carrier bag of camcorder tapes nobody has been able to play since about 2006. All of it is now, somehow, your responsibility.

Most people respond in one of two ways, and both lose things. Either you cannot bring yourself to touch any of it, so it sits untouched until a phone contract lapses or a hard drive dies in the drawer. Or you steel yourself, have a clear-out while you can still bear to, and throw away things you would give anything to have back a year later.

There is a better order to do this in, and most of it is about not making decisions yet.

Secure everything before you sort anything

The single most useful thing to know is that rescuing and deciding are two different jobs, and you should do all of the first before any of the second.

Rescuing means getting copies of everything into a place you control, in a form that still opens. It involves no choices about what is worth keeping. You are not curating; you are stopping the clock. Deciding, which is what to keep, what to let go, what to gather into something you will actually look at, can wait months, or years, or never. The mistake is collapsing the two into a single grim afternoon of sorting, because that afternoon almost always falls in the first few weeks after a death, which is exactly when your judgement about what matters is least to be trusted.

So the order is plain. Rescue now, while access is still open and you have the will to do it. Decide later, when you are someone who can.

Getting photos and videos off a phone

A phone is usually where the most recent and most precious material lives, and it is also the easiest to lose access to.

If you can still get into the phone, do not wait. Back it up properly while it is unlocked: turn on the cloud backup if it has one, or plug it into a computer and copy everything off. Do this before anyone changes a password or wipes it to hand it on.

If the phone is locked and the passcode died with the person, be honest with yourself early, because this is hard and sometimes impossible. Apple and Google both have processes for releasing a deceased person's data to the next of kin, but they are slow, document-heavy and not guaranteed. It is worth starting that request and it is worth not pinning all your hope on it. The lesson people learn too late is to get into the phone while they still can, so if you are reading this and the phone is still unlocked, that is the thing to act on today.

Whatever you pull off a phone, keep the videos as carefully as the photos. People back up their photo library and forget that the short clips, the ones with a voice in them, the ten seconds of someone just being themselves, are usually sitting in the same place and are far harder to replace.

The photos and videos that are not on a phone

The phone is only the obvious place. Just as much tends to be scattered elsewhere, and some of it is on a slower but surer path to being lost.

Cloud accounts hold years of material: iCloud, Google Photos, an old Dropbox, the photos attached to an email account. These usually outlive the phone, but they are tied to a login and a bill, and they quietly empty when the card on file expires or the free tier fills up. If you have access, export what is in them rather than leaving it where it sits.

Other people have a great deal you have never seen, and after a death they are often glad to be asked. That is its own task and worth its own effort. Gathering memories from family and friends is where a lot of the best photographs turn out to have been all along.

Then there is the physical and the obsolete. Boxes of prints. Albums. Slides. And the formats that are actively dying: camcorder MiniDV, Hi8, VHS, cine film. These do not wait politely. Magnetic tape degrades, and the machines that play it are vanishing. If there is family video on tape, getting it digitised is the most time-critical thing in this whole article after rescuing a locked phone, because a tape you cannot play is a few years away from being a tape nobody can play. A high-street or postal digitising service will handle prints and tapes for a reasonable cost, and it is worth the money.

When you do sort them, resist the urge to cull

When the time comes to go through it all, and again, that time is later and not now, the strongest instinct is to tidy. To delete the blurry ones, the near-duplicates, the accidental shots of the floor. Resist it, or at least slow it right down.

In the years I have spent watching families keep people, I have never once heard someone regret keeping too much. The regret is always the other way: the photo deleted in a clear-out, the video recorded over, the album that went to the tip when the house was cleared. What gets lost in a cull is almost never the obvious keeper. It is the odd, unflattering, throwaway frame that turns out later to be the one that catches them exactly, mid-sentence and unposed and looking like nobody else.

The good photo is easy to spot and easy to keep. The valuable one often looks like a mistake. So when in doubt, keep it. Storage is cheap. Regret is not.

Where to keep them so they stay openable

Once things are rescued, the job is keeping them in a state where they can actually be opened, by someone, in years to come. A surprising amount is lost not by deletion but by quiet inaccessibility: the external drive that dies unspun in a drawer, the file in a format nothing opens any more, the account whose password nobody wrote down. A photograph you cannot open is already lost. It just does not know it yet.

Two rules cover most of it. Keep more than one copy, in more than one place, so a single dead drive is not a catastrophe. And do not let the only copy live somewhere that depends on one person remembering it exists and paying for it.

The other thing worth doing early is sharing. Photos and videos held by one person in one place are fragile in every sense. The same material copied out to the people who would want it, and gathered somewhere the whole family can reach, is both safer and more use to everyone. That is usually the point at which scattered rescued files become something better: an online memory box the whole family can add to and return to, rather than a folder on one laptop nobody else can find.

After the rescue

None of this has to happen in one go. The parts that matter most are, awkwardly, the least emotional ones, the mechanical rescue jobs, and they are the ones to do now. The sorting and the choosing and the building of something you actually want to look at is the slow, later work, the part that is really about keeping someone's memory alive, and there is no rush on it at all.

We built Northstar Keep partly for that later stage: a place to gather rescued photos and videos where the rest of the family can add their own without making an account, so the material stops being one person's hard-drive problem and becomes somewhere everyone can go. But the urgent half of this is older and simpler than any product. Rescue first. A photograph kept badly can be moved somewhere better later. A photograph lost is just lost.