Guide
iPhone Legacy Contact: From Digital Vault To Family Museum
How to add an Apple Legacy Contact on iPhone, what your family actually receives from iCloud, and how to turn that digital vault into a curated museum room.
1. Add a Legacy Contact on your iPhone
The setting takes about two minutes and lives inside your Apple Account, not inside Photos. Without it, Apple usually requires a court order before a family can reach a single photograph.
- Open Settings and tap your name at the top of the screen.
- Tap Sign-In & Security, then Legacy Contact.
- Tap Add Legacy Contact and confirm with Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode.
- Choose someone from your contacts — a partner, an adult child, a sibling, or a close friend.
- If you are in a Family Sharing group, iPhone offers those members first; anyone else can still be chosen manually.
- Repeat the process to add a second contact. Two keys in two households is far safer than one.
2. Store and share the access key properly
The access key is the half of the system families lose. Apple will not release data without it, no matter who is asking.
- Send the key through Messages so it is saved automatically in your contact's conversation.
- Also print a paper copy — screens get locked, phones get wiped, and Messages history gets cleared.
- Store the printed key with your will or in the same place as your other legal documents.
- Tell your contact plainly what the key is for and that they will also need your death certificate.
- Check the key still exists once a year, at the same time you review your other legacy settings.
3. Know exactly what Apple releases — and what it does not
A Legacy Contact request creates a temporary Apple Account holding your data for a limited window, generally around three years. It is a vault handover, not a permanent archive.
- Included: iCloud Photos, notes, mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, messages, files in iCloud Drive, health data and device backups.
- Not included: purchased films, music and books, payment details, and anything stored in your iCloud Keychain.
- Subscriptions stop, so shared albums and any storage above the free tier can disappear when the account closes.
- The data arrives as raw files with filenames and timestamps — no names, no places, no explanations.
- Once the temporary account expires, whatever has not been downloaded elsewhere is gone.
4. Link your legacy plan to a Memorivos museum room
A digital vault answers the question of access. It does not answer the question of meaning. Give the files somewhere to arrive.
- Create a room in your museum for the era or family line the iCloud archive covers.
- Upload the photographs, voice notes and videos that matter most, rather than every file in the backup.
- Let Clara, the Digital Curator, ask about each memory and record who is in it, where it was, and why it mattered.
- Name your Legacy Contact as a Memorivos guest so they can walk the museum long before they ever need the access key.
- Write down both instructions together: the Apple access key location, and the museum your family should visit.
- The result is the opposite of a folder dump — a cinematic, curated hall where every file already carries its story.
A vault stores files. A museum tells your family who they were.
Give the photographs in your iCloud archive a permanent home — cinematic rooms, curated exhibits, and the stories behind every image.