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Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Yup. My parents aren't even in ill health, let alone dead, but we recently took all the old VHS tapes, including a lot of OTA recordings, and a significant number of DVDs, and dumped them. Recordings of talking with relatives got digitized, same way you'd keep family photos.
I have no expectation that people keep my junk. I'll pass on a handful of stuff like identifying photos of people and places, but nobody wants or needs the 500 photos of my cat. Even I don't want that many, but storage is cheap enough that I don't bother to delete the useless ones.
You only have 500 photos of your cat? Is your camera broken? Got the cat yesterday?
I'm trying to curate a few hundred photos for my kids. I've written a couple of bios of relatives. I'd like to record something like a story for them. If they want to trash it, that's fine, but at least there will be something meaningful for them if they want it.
Assuming it survives the climate wars. 🫠
My wife’s parents recently passed. It took months to slog through their stuff and my wife was over it only weeks in. She dumped so much but constantly fights with herself for both taking more than she wanted/needed to and yet less that what she feels she should have. We’ve told our daughter multiple times “our stuff May mean a lot to us, it doesn’t have to mean anything at all to you. If you don’t want it, never feel bad dumping/selling/letting it go.” Out of all the stuff we all collect in life just by living, barely anything has any sentimental value.
On one hand I’ve got a huge collection of photos and albums I’ve taken and collected. I’m trying to clear some out as I go… but I’m not looking forward to that process when my parents go. My dad’s an avid photographer and I know he has a few hundred thousand photos, most of which are near duplicates and he rarely cleans them up.