Flickr is, quietly and almost accidentally, one of the largest visual archives of human life ever assembled. Not curated, not commissioned… just millions of people photographing what they saw for over twenty years. Geotagged, timestamped, described in their own words. Future historians will find things in there they didn’t know they needed.
Which makes what happens to those photographs, and to the people who made them, a question worth taking seriously.
Between November 2025 and March 2026, we spoke with over 2,400 Flickr members about digital legacy: what they’d thought about, what they’d done, and what they wished existed. The headline finding was stark. 82% had thought about what should happen to their photographs after they died. Only 12% had done anything about it. That gap between thinking and doing is the thrust of this report.
It isn’t hard to understand why the gap exists. Kristy, an archivist-librarian in Austin with 25 years of professional experience, is currently living with Stage 4 cancer. If anyone should be able to navigate digital legacy planning, it’s her. But she described the process as simultaneously “overwhelming, and also boring.” The resources her medical team pointed her to were severely dated. She’s making it up as she goes along.
The platforms aren’t helping much. Death arrives quietly on Flickr. Perhaps in a comment on a final photograph, or finding an account that hasn’t posted in eleven years and sits there, still. Hans, a retired librarian in the Netherlands, described a discomfort on behalf of his friend: “Knowing him, I don’t think he would have liked that his pictures were still online.”
But not everyone wants a formal memorial. Quinn, a digital humanities specialist in California, described encountering a deceased friend in old search results, still showing up when they searched on a technical problem. “I liked seeing those ghostly echoes of him,” they said. “He’s in his element.”
Barbara and Bill W., a couple from Ohio, sit together revisiting fifty-year-old photographs, testing what they can still recall. They call it memory salvaging. That practice is what any serious approach to digital legacy needs to protect. The metadata is the meaning, and we, the industry, have to do a better job at making sure it stays together.
Our recommendations in this report come directly from these conversations:
- Very long-term subscriptions: People will pay. They told us.
- Nuanced legacy contacts: Family of origin isn’t always the right place for a life’s work.
- Proactive archive configuration: Allow people to plan for their digital afterlife.
- Donation pathways to cultural institutions: Flickr is history in the making, and cultural institutions should be collecting it.
What was clear across all our conversations was how much people care. Not just about the photographs, but about the social hum around them: conversations, conviviality, contributions, and connections. The people who built this archive deserve tools that take their work as seriously as they do.
- Read the Report: Death Is Not an Edge Case (Google doc)
Researched and written by Fattori McKenna, edited by George Oates.
Licensed under CC By 4.0.
