CairnVault Research

What happens to my photos when I die?

It depends entirely on where the photos live, and the platforms treat this very differently from each other.

Apple/iCloud Photos are explicitly not in the category Apple's Legacy Contact excludes. Recall from Q2: the exclusion list is "movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account, and data stored in your iCloud Keychain (payment information, passwords, and passkeys)" — photos aren't on that list, so a Legacy Contact who has the access key and a death certificate can retrieve them. Source

Google Photos, similarly, is one of the product categories Inactive Account Manager can share: Google's help page lists "Photos" among the exportable categories in its general data-export tool (Takeout), and IAM is built to hand a designated contact a download link for exactly this kind of data once triggered. Source You can also proactively export your own Google Photos library at any time via Google Takeout, while you're alive, as a backup — that's a self-service tool for the account owner, not a survivor-access mechanism, but it's worth knowing about for your own redundancy.

Facebook/Instagram photos: per Q3, once memorialized, "Content the person shared (ex: photos, posts) stays on Facebook and is visible to the audience it was shared with" — the photos aren't deleted, but "in most cases, once an account is memorialized, content can't be removed from it," and a legacy contact's only download mechanism is the general "Download a copy of what you've shared on Facebook" action, not selective photo retrieval. Source

What we could not verify: whether Google's Inactive Account Manager, in practice, delivers a full-resolution photo library or a compressed/limited export — the help documentation confirms Photos as a shareable category but doesn't specify format or quality for the IAM-triggered share specifically (as opposed to a manual Takeout export, which does specify format details).

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Who wrote this, and why you should check it

We are CairnVault. We build an encrypted digital-legacy plan — your family can open it when you die, and nobody, including us, can read it while you are alive. So we are not a neutral party on this subject, which is precisely why every claim above links to somebody else's documentation rather than to ours.

If we have got something wrong, tell us — we correct the text and record the correction with a date. We have already had to retract several claims from our own earlier materials.

Read the full teardown of every digital-legacy service · Watch the 4-minute explainer · cairnvault.app