Most photographers spend years building an archive worth protecting, but very few have a plan for what happens to it after they die. Copyright, physical media, cloud accounts, and stock licensing don't sort themselves out automatically, and without a plan, decades of work can vanish or get tied up in legal chaos.
Coming to you from David Bergman with Adorama, this detailed video has Bergman walking through both the legal and practical sides of protecting your photographic archive after death. Under US copyright law, you own the copyright to your images the moment you press the shutter, and that protection extends for your entire life plus 70 years. That means your archive is a genuine asset, one that could generate income for two generations of your family. The moment you sign that copyright away to a client, that long-term value disappears entirely, not just for you but for whoever inherits your estate. Bergman uses the story of Vivian Maier, the Chicago street photographer whose archive ended up in a storage auction and triggered years of international legal battles, as a sharp example of what happens without a plan.
The Maier case is instructive because it shows that owning the physical negatives and owning the copyright are two completely different things. John Maloof legally purchased her medium format negatives but had no right to reproduce or sell the images until a distant French cousin was tracked down and a confidential settlement was reached. A basic will with clear instructions would have prevented all of it. Bergman is direct on this point: a will or a living trust isn't just for wealthy people, it's for anyone who has produced work they care about. He also covers the concept of naming a photographic executor, someone with enough knowledge of photography to manage your archive on behalf of your estate, who doesn't have to be the same person receiving the financial proceeds.
Hard drives fail, cloud subscriptions lapse, and stock agency accounts don't transfer automatically. Bergman covers several practical steps you should take now to make your archive survivable and usable by someone else: culling your files to your best work, building a logical file naming and folder structure, embedding metadata and captions, and thinking carefully about what in your archive was never meant for other eyes. He also points to a US law called the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which gives heirs a legal pathway into your online accounts, and notes that any in-platform legacy tools you set up at places like Google or Facebook actually take priority over your will. Physical prints and photo books get a mention too, not just for display but as a preservation strategy that requires no subscriptions, no hardware, and no file format compatibility concerns.
Bergman also shares exactly what he has done for his own 35-year archive, including the specific structure of his living trust and the one-page instruction sheet he keeps alongside it. Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Bergman.
6 Comments
While some professional's archives may have monetary value after their passing most of our images are of sentimental value only and generally less than you might think to your family or anyone else. The images will be of zero value if only accessible via things like Lightroom virtual catalogs, so there is a need to render images and save them to an easily accessible and understandable file system in a universal format, which generally means jpeg. The truth is most of our carefully curated images will be deleted shortly after we are.
This is true and applies as well to the family scrapbooks and photo albums as to RAW and JPEG files. The next generation (and more likely, the generation after that) doesn't place the same value on the images, family or not, that we do. The memories of us in others don't survive the death of those who knew us well. After that, images are just that, and very few of those are kept (if you had a hundred images of your great-great-grand-aunt, how many would you preserve?). That might change of course if you're famous (or notorious!).
If I had any pictures at all from a great-great-grand-aunt, I'd keep every one of them. However, that far back would probably predate photography. My paternal great-grandfather was born in 1865, and even though he lived until 1949, I don't have even a single picture of him. I have a few of my grandparents, but both of my father's parents died before I was born, so pictures are all I have. And I cherish every one.
Yep, I agree. Know one will care enough to deal with it and why would I care if I'm dead? :)
If I could determine the monetary value of my images today, it would make it easier to decide if they were worth preserving for my children. I recently opened a Fine Art America account (which can be transferred to heirs) with the idea that my wife or children could benefit from some passive income, even if it's not a huge amount. Alas, selling photography online takes time to continuously upload work, and revenue is generally expected to be pretty minimal. But any sort of passive income for my kids would be appreciated, certainly better than my library of books or music they're not interested in. But to date, after a month or two, my sales thru FAA have been zero. So it's hard to decide if my images are worth the time to maintain an online site today, much as less in a turbulent and unpredictable world they may encounter thirty years from now.
Don't kid yourself. If your photos aren't of great historical significance, they are worthless when you die. My will calls for their deletion, as well as the destruction of all of the old family photos that I inherited, some dating to the 19th century. I won't miss them and the world won't miss them.