Guide
Digital Legacy Setup: Apple and Google, Step by Step
A step-by-step guide to setting up an Apple Legacy Contact and Google Inactive Account Manager, and what account inheritance still cannot preserve.
1. Add an Apple Legacy Contact
A Legacy Contact is a person you nominate who can request access to your iCloud data after your death. Without one, Apple generally requires a court order — and families often never recover the photographs at all.
- On iPhone or iPad: Settings → tap your name → Sign-In & Security → Legacy Contact.
- On Mac: System Settings → your name → Sign-In & Security → Legacy Contact.
- Tap Add Legacy Contact, choose someone from your contacts, and confirm with Face ID or your passcode.
- Share the access key with them — send it in Messages, or print a physical copy and store it with your will.
- Add more than one contact if you can. A single key held by one person is a single point of failure.
- Tell them what to expect: they will need the access key plus a copy of your death certificate to make a request.
2. Set up Google Inactive Account Manager
Google's tool works differently: instead of acting after death, it triggers after a chosen period of inactivity — typically three, six, twelve or eighteen months.
- Go to myaccount.google.com and open Data & privacy → More options → Make a plan for your digital legacy.
- Choose the inactivity period after which the plan should run.
- Add a phone number and a backup email so Google can warn you before anything happens.
- Nominate up to ten trusted contacts and choose exactly which data each of them receives — Drive, Gmail, Photos, YouTube and so on.
- Write the message they will receive. Say plainly what the files are and what you would like done with them.
- Decide whether the account should be deleted afterwards. Deleting removes shared albums and YouTube videos others may rely on.
3. Cover the other accounts that hold memories
Apple and Google are the two largest vaults, but a family's history is scattered across many more.
- Facebook: Settings → Memorialisation to appoint a Legacy Contact, or choose permanent deletion.
- Instagram: accounts can be memorialised or removed by an immediate family member with documentation.
- Microsoft, Dropbox and most password managers have no legacy contact at all — plan for these manually.
- Keep an inventory of accounts and where the recovery details live, stored with your will rather than in an email draft.
- Review the list once a year. Platforms change their policies more often than families change their plans.
4. What account inheritance still cannot preserve
Legacy contacts hand over files. They do not hand over meaning — and meaning is the part that actually disappears.
- Inherited data arrives as an undated, unlabelled dump. Nobody knows who is in the photographs.
- Access is conditional on a platform's ongoing policy and on the account continuing to exist.
- Voices, explanations and the stories behind each image are almost never captured anywhere.
- A curated archive — files plus the story, dates and names attached to them — is what survives a generation.
- Memorivos exists for that second layer: exhibits your family can walk through, not a folder they must decode.
Inheritance passes on files. A museum passes on meaning.
Memorivos preserves the photographs, recordings and the stories that explain them, in rooms your family can visit.