Preserving Photos and Videos After Suicide Loss: A Complete Guide

Our son John’s wake was closed casket. Families choose that for all kinds of reasons, and it was a difficult choice we made, but it meant no one who came to say goodbye that day got to see him at the wake.

That was hard enough on its own, and it left us wanting something more than just his football jersey and taekwondo black belt covering the casket. So in the days before, Teri and I did the only thing we could think to do. We asked people to send us images that they had. Family. Friends. His teammates. Anyone who had a photograph or a video of our son, we wanted it, whatever they had.

Within two days we had hundreds of pictures. A few videos too, more than we knew what to do with. It was exactly what we wanted and needed.

Preserving the photos and videos after his suicide loss started for us in that scramble, standing over poster boards for John’s wake, sorting pictures into piles. Family in one corner. Friends in another. Sports. Vacations. It felt strange to be doing something so practical in the middle of the worst days of our lives. It also felt necessary. It was deeply personal.

That instinct, gather everything and protect it before you lose it for good, has not left me since. A phone can crash. A hard drive can fail. A box of prints left in a damp basement can be gone in a season. Accidents happen, and a single accident should never be the reason you lose someone twice.

This is what we have learned, in the years since that wake, about keeping photographs, videos, and even a voice safe for good.

If working through old photos and memories starts to feel like more than you can carry right now, please call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. They are available around the clock.

A quick note of importance before we start about accessing the device of the person you lost. If their device is locked and you cannot get past a passcode, that is a different problem with its own complications and challenges, and our post on accessing a device after suicide loss covers it separately. If you are trying to decide what happens to someone’s actual online accounts, whether to memorialize or close them, digital legacy after suicide loss is the place for that. This post picks up from there, once you have access to the photographs, videos, and voice you want to protect for good.

One more thing before we get into it. This post covers a lot of practical ground, cloud storage, digitizing, backups, voicemail, physical copies. None of it needs to happen this week, this month, or in any particular order. If you are newly grieving and reading this with a fog over everything, it is fine to read this once, do nothing, and come back to it later. It will still be here.

Another real option to consider is give parts of the task to someone you trust. There are helpers in this world and you can tap into their support.

In This Post

• Why We Started Preserving Every Photo and Video We Could Find
• Asking the People Who Knew Them
• Getting Prints Off Paper
• Why One Backup Is Never Enough for Photos and Videos After Suicide Loss
• Finding One Face in Thousands of Photos
• Making Sure the Videos Survive Too
• Saving Their Voice
• Labeling Things So They Can Be Found Later
• What You Can Hold in Your Hands
• When Looking Becomes Too Hard, and Where to Start

Why We Started Preserving Every Photo and Video We Could Find

If you are early in the process of dealing with your suicide loss, still working through the wake or the funeral itself, our post on funerals, wakes, and the gathering after walks through that separately.

What this post focuses on is once the service is behind you and the boxes of photographs are still sitting on the table.

We organized those poster boards at John’s wake by chapter of his life, not by when the pictures were taken. One board for family. One for friends. One for football and Taekwondo. One for the trips we had taken together. Guests walked past them for hours that day, stopping, pointing, telling each other stories about a picture they recognized. They generated smiles and tears. They helped to remind everyone there that John’s life story was a rich one.

After the wake, we did not put those photographs back in a box. We built photo albums instead, organized the same way, family and friends and sports and vacations, and we keep them in John’s room to this day. When people stay with us and wander into John’s room, we often catch them sitting with an album open on their lap. It touches us every time. And yes, we still call it John’s room even after seventeen years.

Psychologists call what those albums do “continuing bonds”, the idea that a relationship with someone who died does not simply end, it changes shape. Preserving photographs and videos is one of the clearest, most concrete ways survivors keep that bond alive. I have written a post on Physics = Love, continuing bonds after suicide loss and it explores the idea in more depth, if you would like to understand more about it.

If you are also planning a memorial gathering and want ideas for displaying photographs there, our post on celebration of life after suicide loss has specific ideas for organizing a photo table by chapter of a life, the same approach we used at John’s wake.

What this post covers is what happens after that day or the wake, the long work of making sure none of it gets lost.

If you are early in this and wondering whether it is worth the effort to gather what is scattered across other people’s phones and photo boxes, many survivors find that it is. It gave us something to hold in the hardest week of our lives, and it still gives us something to hold now. Your own answer may look different, and there is no wrong one.

Asking the People Who Knew Them

Ask everyone. That is the simplest thing to know before anything else in this post. Family. Coworkers. The parents of childhood friends. A coach or a teacher. Anyone who spent real time with the person you lost is probably holding a photograph or a video you have never seen, sitting in a phone or a shoebox they have not thought to share because it never occurred to them that you would want it.

Many survivors in our support group meetings have described the same regret, that they waited too long to ask, and some photographs and videos were lost for good in the meantime. Someone buys a new phone or computer. A social media account goes quiet. People move, and boxes get left behind in the move.

That regret is real, and it is not a verdict on you if you are not ready to do this today. There is no deadline here. It helps to get started sooner rather than later, but this will still be worth doing whenever you get to it.

A short, direct message is usually enough. Something like this works well as a starting point. “I’m trying to gather everything I can that shows John. If you have any photos or videos of him, even ones that seem small or ordinary, I would love a copy.” Most people are relieved to be asked. It gives them a way to help when they may have felt helpless since the day they heard the news.

Not everything you find will be easy to receive. Occasionally a photo or a message turns up from close to the end, and it can read differently in hindsight than it did at the time. We try to read something into the photo now that we know the tragic ending. If that happens, our post on hindsight bias speaks directly to that experience, and it is worth having read before you go looking rather than after.

Getting Prints Off Paper

Not everything worth keeping lives on a phone. There were generations of people who only used a physical camera. Older photographs, the ones from before everyone carried a cellphone camera everywhere, usually exist only as prints, and prints are fragile in ways a digital files are not. Heat warps them. Water ruins them. Mold and mildew can damage them when you least expect it. A house fire could take them in minutes.

Getting a print into digital form is easier than it sounds. A flatbed scanner at home handles a small stack well. For a larger collection, Google’s free PhotoScan app uses your phone’s camera to photograph a print without the glare a normal photo would pick up, and the digital copy flows straight into Google Photos. For hundreds or thousands of prints, a professional digitizing service can process a full box in one batch, which is often faster and more consistent than doing it print by print yourself.

I learned this firsthand a few years after we lost John, when my father and then my sister passed away within a short span of each other. I bought a photo scanner and spent months working through more than ten thousand family photographs from both sides of our family, sorting decades of shoeboxes into folders I could actually find things in again. It was slow, quiet work, and it gave me something steady to do with my hands while I grieved two more losses. I would not trade that time for anything.

Why One Backup Is Never Enough for Photos and Videos After Suicide Loss

For twenty years before we lost John, and for years afterward too, I built a career in technology strategy, protecting inventions and negotiating what happened to them. A large part of that work was thinking about risk. What happens if this one thing fails. Where is the backup. That instinct was part of me when I became a suicide loss survivor. It just found a new, much more personal use.

Archivists and IT professionals both work from the same basic principle, usually called the 3-2-1 rule. Keep at least three copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Store those copies across at least two different types of storage media. Keep at least one copy somewhere physically separate from your home.

You do not have to set all of this up in a single afternoon. One backup made today is real protection that did not exist yesterday, and you can build the rest of the system around it over time.

Cloud storage handles the “off your devices entirely” piece well, since a lost phone or a failed hard drive cannot touch it.

• Google Photos gives every free account 15 GB shared with Gmail and Drive, enough for thousands of photographs, and it backs up automatically once you turn that setting on. If you outgrow the free tier, Google One plans start at $1.99 a month for 100 GB and scale up from there.
• Apple’s iCloud+ works the same way for anyone in the Apple ecosystem, starting at 5 GB free and stepping up through paid tiers.
• Amazon Prime members get a benefit worth knowing about too. Amazon Photos includes unlimited full resolution photo storage for Prime members, plus five gigabytes of video storage at no extra cost.
• Microsoft OneDrive is a solid option too, especially if your family already works inside Windows.

Whichever service you choose, the important habit is turning on automatic backup, so every new photo protects itself the moment it is taken rather than depending on you to remember. And do not stop at one service. A second cloud account, even a free one, is a real second copy, not just a nice extra.

Finding One Face in Thousands of Photos

Once your photographs are backed up, finding the ones that matter most should not mean scrolling for an hour. Google Photos has a feature called People and Pets that groups photos by face, and once you have tagged a person by name even once, you can search for them directly.

I use this constantly now. I can type John’s name and pull up every photograph that includes him, or search something like “John and Teri” to find a specific kind of moment, or search around a particular event or year to find photographs I had genuinely forgotten existed. It works because the tagging happens after the photos are already stored, so there is no reason to wait until your library is perfectly organized before you start backing it up.

Making Sure the Videos Survive Too

Photographs get most of the attention in a conversation like this one, but video deserves the same care, maybe more, because a voice and a way of moving through the world come through video in a way a still photograph cannot capture.

Make sure whatever cloud service you choose is actually backing up video, not just photos. Some plans handle the two differently, and video files are large enough that they can quietly stop backing up once you hit a storage limit without any obvious warning.

If people made a memorial or tribute videos after your person died and posted them anywhere public, save your own copy rather than trusting the platform to keep it there forever. A channel can go inactive. A video can be taken down for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Once you have your own copy saved to your device and backed up like everything else, that risk disappears.

I made memorial video myself, a tribute video for John’s tenth anniversary built around old photographs and a song that felt right, and I have written elsewhere about what that process was actually like to live through. It took me years to work up the courage to try. If you are thinking about making one and are not sure where to start, When Music Becomes a Bridge to Healing walks through that experience in full.

Saving Their Voice

A voicemail is sometimes the last new thing survivors have of someone’s actual voice, and it is also one of the most fragile things on this list. Carriers delete old voicemails automatically, often within 30 to 90 days, and a phone upgrade or a canceled line can wipe them out without warning.

Save any voicemail you want to keep as soon as you can, rather than leaving it sitting in your carrier’s system.

• On an iPhone, open the voicemail, tap the share icon, and you can save it directly as an audio file.
• On Android, most carrier phone apps have a save or export option in the voicemail menu itself.

If neither option is available on your specific phone, playing the voicemail on speaker while using your phone’s built in screen recording feature will at least capture the audio as a last resort.

Once it is saved as a file, treat it exactly like a photograph. Back it up to the cloud, copy it to a physical drive, and do not leave the only copy sitting on the one device that could fail tomorrow.

If the voicemail or message you are trying to save is also the last thing they ever said to you, that carries its own emotions, separate from the technical question of how to save it. Our post on final words, what survivors carry after suicide loss speaks directly to that.

Labeling Things So They Can Be Found Later

A backup nobody can find is barely better than no backup at all. Once photographs and videos are safely stored, take a few extra minutes to label them in a way that will still make sense to you, or to your children, ten years from now.

A simple folder structure works well. Something like a year, then an event or a season inside it, is usually enough. Adding a name or a short caption to a photo in Google Photos or iCloud takes seconds and pays off enormously the first time someone else in your family goes looking for “that picture from the lake house” and actually finds it.

This is a small thing, but it is the difference between a backup that protects a memory and a backup that just protects a file.

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time studying my families’ genealogy, I can personally tell you that beyond two generations, many people cannot identify photos of their ancestors or specific events that matter to you. Which is exactly why a two-minute caption today is worth doing.

What You Can Hold in Your Hands

Digital backups are essential, but there is real comfort in something you do not need a password or an app to see. A printed photograph does not require electricity. It does not disappear if a company changes its storage policy or a subscription lapses.

A USB drive or an external hard drive is the simplest physical backup for digital files, inexpensive and easy to use. Copy your folders over, then store the drive somewhere other than your house. A safe deposit box at your bank works well if that is available to you, since it protects against the exact disasters, fire, flood, theft, that would also threaten a copy kept at home. If a safe deposit box is not realistic, a trusted family member’s house, a desk at work, or even a drawer at a close friend’s home accomplishes the same basic goal.

I personally used to keep a USB drive at my workplace, and an external hard drive at my mother’s home. What matters is that it is not under your own roof, not which roof it ends up under instead.

For the photographs that matter most, printing them is worth the small cost. Walmart’s Photo Center prints standard photos for well under twenty cents each, which is a small price for something that can outlast almost every digital format that exists today. We did exactly this with the photographs we gathered for John’s wake. Those printed albums sitting in his room, the ones our guests still find themselves reaching for, would not exist if we had only ever kept the digital files.

Photographs are one of many ways survivors keep connection alive. Our post on ritual and remembrance explores other rituals that serve a similar purpose, if you are looking for more than one.

When Looking Becomes Too Hard, and Where to Start

It can be hard to look at these photographs at all in the early months. The tears come fast, and a picture of an ordinary Tuesday can undo you as much as one from a birthday or a holiday. Some survivors put the albums away in a drawer for a while, unable to look, and that is not a failure of any kind. It is a sign that the loss is still raw enough to hurt on contact, which is exactly what it can be at that stage.

If this work is stirring up more than grief, if it is bringing on thoughts of not wanting to be here yourself, please call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Survivors of suicide loss carry an elevated risk themselves, and reaching out is never a bother, whatever time of day it is.

There is no schedule for when looking gets easier. For some of us it is months. For some of us it is years. What usually shifts, eventually, is not the sadness so much as what sits beside it, a little more room for a genuine smile at a picture that used to only bring tears.

If everything above feels like too much at once, start smaller than you think you need to. This week, turn on automatic photo backup on your phone. That alone takes a few minutes and protects everything currently on your device. When you are ready, buy a USB drive and copy your most important files to that USB drive and put it somewhere outside your home. When you are ready for that too, print the photographs that matter most and put them somewhere you will actually see them.

Seventeen years was not enough time with John, and it never will feel like it was. But it was a full life while it lasted. Football games. A black belt earned one careful test at a time. John and his friends trying to do parkour. His first role in the school play. Sunflowers grown in our garden because he said they were the happiest flower there was. The photographs and videos we gathered after he died are proof of all of that, not proof of how it ended.

We still keep those albums in his room. Guests still find them and sit with them, and every time it happens, something in us settles a little. To be honest, I also look at them once and awhile when I need an emotional refresher. John is remembered the way he actually lived.

If you are just starting the work of preserving photos and videos after suicide loss, gathering what is scattered, backing it up somewhere safe, maybe printing a few to hold in your hands, you are doing something that will matter for a very long time. Not just to you. To everyone who comes after you and wants to know who this person really was.

Start with one thing this week.
The rest can follow, one backup and one photograph at a time.

Posts You May Also Like

• Accessing a Device After Suicide Loss: Before You Unlock It – If a phone or laptop is locked, this covers the legal and technical realities of getting in, separate from what to do with the photos once you’re through.
• Digital Legacy After Suicide Loss: What to Do With Accounts – A platform-by-platform guide to memorializing, closing, or downloading someone’s online accounts, a different decision than preserving your own copies of their photos.
• Celebration of Life After Suicide Loss: Ideas to Honor a Life – Specific ideas for organizing a photo table and video slideshow if you’re planning a memorial gathering.
• Ritual and Remembrance – Other small, ongoing ways survivors keep connection to the person they lost alive.
• When Music Becomes a Bridge to Healing – What it actually took to build a memorial tribute video from old photographs and a song that finally felt right.

PRINTABLE GUIDE PDF

A two-page PDF guide has been generated for survivors to print, save, or share.