Who will clean up in the cloud after you make your exit?

A photographer friend said a while ago that in some ways he thought digital photography was doing people few favours.

In the old days, when we took a roll of film out of the camera and handed it in at the chemist’s shop to be expensively developed and printed, he thinks many more people treasured and looked after the pictures they’d taken.

The act of selecting the best of each batch to put in an album also meant the less successful or downright fuzzy images were edited out. Those paper packets of rejects might clutter up a drawer or box somewhere for a few years, but would probably be dumped eventually.

Only the pictures we really cared about won a prized place between the covers of an album, and passing a photo album of holiday fun or grandchildren around when we had visitors always provided a talking point and a means of catching up on the doings of friends and family.

Today’s technology that cuts out the middle-man and means we can upload to computer then print out pictures inexpensively at our leisure also means that we tend to treat the images with contempt and actually print very few because of the cost of decent photo paper.

It also means that when the pictures are being loaded into a huge digital library many of us rarely bother to edit them down to manageable proportions. Before you know it a collection of thousands of pictures – wonderful or otherwise – is built up only to be ignored.

Failing to do something with our digital photographs, or most of them, doesn’t mean they are meaningless to us, though. Just knowing they are there is comforting, even if we wouldn’t necessarily sit visitors around the PC to view the extensive “album”.

This library of images has not only sentimental but also monetary value, and a question we should be asking ourselves is ‘what do I want to happen to this collection, as and when I die?’

It’s estimated that Britons have more than £2bn worth of possessions stored online in the shape of photographs, films, music and games. But most of us have given no thought to what will happen to these possessions and how they will be accessed, as and when we pass on.

Yet, when you think about it, many people would have strong feelings about what they wanted to happen to printed photos and might name particular people with certain interests to have those items later, or at least to take charge of sifting and organising them.

Only around 10 per cent of Britons have incorporated into their will provision for access to this kind of material and to information they’ve stored in so-called ‘cloud’ services such as Hotmail, Facebook and Twitter.

Your executors may have some idea of what your ‘digital legacy’ might include, but they can’t do anything with it if they don’t know your login details to deal with it.

Valuable digital information and the idea of having a “virtual life” is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that hasn’t until now featured in the will making process, says solicitor Julia Rangecroft, tax and trusts partner at Mills and Reeve law firm in Leeds.

“It’s principally a matter of good housekeeping. Your digital assets need to be recorded as assets of the estate when you make your will and the relevant access information stored appropriately. However, it’s important to remember that the will becomes a public document which can be viewed by anybody through application to the Probate Registry.

“So it’s better to keep the details off the face of the will so that your executors can distribute information to relevant beneficiaries.”

The term “digital legacy” rightly also covers areas such as Facebook pages. If someone dies without leaving some record of login information, then a Facebook page continues to exist, which can be upsetting to some or all of those close to the deceased.

You could leave instructions with a friend or executor about closing down such pages, says Rangecroft. As far as digital activities are concerned it’s important, as with other matters, to leave a trail of evidence that these things exist.

She adds: “If you don’t make your wishes clear about what you want to happen to your digital legacy and don’t name specific items and people you wish your music collection of personal photos to go to, then they go under the ‘general’ heading and that’s when disputes can unfortunately arise.”