The photographs
Where the family photographs are now
For about a hundred years the family photographs were in a box in a cupboard. When somebody died you sat on the floor and went through them. Nobody needed permission and nothing had to be unlocked.
They’re on a phone now. The phone has a passcode, and the passcode was in one person’s head.
Of everything a family loses track of after a death, this is the one people are still upset about years later. The bank gets sorted out. The photographs sometimes do not.
The three places they live
On the phone itself. In whatever the phone backs up to, which for most people is iCloud or Google Photos. And on an old laptop or a hard drive in a drawer, which is where the pictures from before about 2015 usually ended up.
Most families have all three and know about one.
The passcode matters more than the password
An account password can often be reset, given time and paperwork. A device passcode generally cannot.
Modern phones are built so the manufacturer can’t open them. That’s a deliberate design, and it’s the same property that protects a stolen phone. It doesn’t have an exception for families.
A phone that is locked, with nobody who knows the six digits, is usually the end of the road for whatever is only on that phone.
Do not keep guessing
It’s the natural thing to do and it makes matters worse. Repeated wrong attempts lock the phone for longer and longer, and a device can be set to erase itself after enough failures.
If the phone is unlocked when you find it, or somebody knows the code, that’s the moment to act. Turn off the auto-lock, plug it in, and get the pictures off before anything else.
The laptop in the drawer
This is the quiet one. Twenty years of photographs on a machine that hasn’t been switched on since 2019, with a login nobody has.
Disk encryption is on by default on most computers sold in the last decade, so the old trick of taking the drive out and reading it elsewhere has stopped working. The recovery key exists, and it’s usually in the account of the person who set the machine up.
Worth finding out now, while somebody can just tell you.
Print a few
It sounds sentimental, and it’s the only method on this page with nothing else to go wrong. A print needs no passcode, no account, no charger and no company still trading.
Nobody needs to print thousands. Twenty photographs in an envelope, with the names written on the back, is more than most families end up with.
What to write down
Not the passcode. Which of the three places the pictures are in, and who else already has a copy.
A sister with the same album shared to her phone is worth more than any recovery process, and it takes one sentence to record that she has it.
Sources
- How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple Account, Apple Support
- About Inactive Account Manager, Google Account Help
Where the pictures are, and who else already has a copy. Two lines, and they save the thing families miss most. Here is a finished binder, free to read: the example binder.