Willl your heirs have access to your online digital photos?

[flipflops]

there's a piece in today's Daily Telegraph saying that a lot of people aren't making sure that their heirs get access to their online accounts, banks, music vaults and photographs and inheritances worth millions of pounds are being lost.

I'm sorry to say that, with my scatty memory, I keep all mine in an address book so it wouldn't be too difficult for anyone to work it out, but have to say it isn't anything I'd ever thought about, and I've got loads of online photos of very sentimental value.

What's your view?

[Patricia jackson]

  Someone was just talking to me the other day about 'photos'. How they will get lost and they are not as valued now. I guess I have to agree. so many photos lay in peoples's cameras or phones - waiting to be developed and a lot of them never will be, but this is progress or so we are told.

[RedMystic]

It drives my husband crazy to have so many photos taking up space on the desktop so I made a deal with him. I back up each of my photo collections to two USBs. One goes into my genealogy records. The other goes into the safety deposit box with our wills and such. Each USB that goes in the safety deposit box is labelled and I've attached a page to the back of the will where I jot down the info contained as a cross check.

We only have one daughter and she knows the system (though at 16 doesn't really care and thinks I'm a bit of a nut when it comes to the family history  ) as well as our executor (who is not family, but understands the value as he and his wife have almost no history recorded and I've been helping him get started on his own family tree).

Hopefully, that will work for the photos I've collected of relatives of the past 130 years.

It won't, as pejay points out, help one fig for those photos that don't get downloaded from phones and cameras. 

[pinefamily]

The points raised are all valid, but is this any different to traditional, hard copy photos being thrown out by relatives and heirs, either through lack of knowledge or indifference?
I go to local markets, and see stalls selling old photos, many of which are unidentified, and which have been picked up by the stall holders at garage sales.

[flipflops]

the article referred to online accounts, photo, music, bank etc that are protected by a password - if you don't leave a note of your passwords your heirs might not have a choice