We leave behind thousands of photos, accounts, subscriptions and conversations. Without preparation, this legacy can become a puzzle for loved ones, or simply disappear. Here is how to organise it, without jargon or spending an entire weekend on it.

What is a digital legacy?

It includes everything you own or produce online: photos and videos stored in the cloud, email and social media accounts, subscriptions, digital purchases such as music, books and games, scanned administrative documents, and sometimes assets such as domain names or cryptocurrency.

In France, the 2016 Digital Republic Act allows people to leave instructions about what should happen to their data after death, either generally or for a particular service. In practice, few people do this, and platforms apply their own rules.

Five things to organise, in order of priority

  1. Access. Without the main password, nothing can be recovered. Use a password manager and arrange for a trusted person to access it; most offer an emergency access feature.
  2. Photos and videos. Bring them together in one place, choose what really matters and share important albums with your family now. A shared album can outlive its creator.
  3. Accounts. Facebook and Google allow you to designate a legacy contact who can close or memorialise an account. Apple offers a legacy contact for iCloud. It takes five minutes.
  4. Subscriptions and payments. List your automatic payments. Your loved ones will need to cancel them; a list will save them months of charges and correspondence.
  5. The words you want to leave. This is the task everyone puts off, and the only one nobody else can do for you. More on that below.

What your loved ones cannot do without you

After a death, loved ones can request account closure and sometimes recover data, with a death certificate and plenty of patience. But they cannot retrieve a message you never wrote, or guess what you wanted to say to each person.

That is why letters, annotated photos, recordings and videos intended for specific people deserve a place of their own, separate from the rest of your digital life: a private space you can change while you are here, with content passed on only after a human has verified the death. That is why DUNELIA exists.

A one-page checklist

  • A password manager with a designated emergency contact.
  • A legacy contact on Google, Apple and Facebook.
  • An “in the event of my death” folder, on paper or digitally, listing accounts, subscriptions and contracts.
  • Shared albums for the photos that matter.
  • A space for messages to be delivered after your death, with a named recipient for each one.

Do one thing each week. In a month, the essentials will be in place, and you will not leave your loved ones with an investigation to carry out while they are grieving.