What to do with the photos after a pet dies

The first job is not choosing a favourite. It is making sure nothing is lost while you are not in a state to notice it going. Photographs of an animal are scattered by default: a few thousand on your own phone, some in a cloud account nobody has logged into for years, and a surprising number on the phones of other people who were there.

Ask for those now rather than later. Family, whoever looked after them while you were away, the friend who came on the walk that summer — people almost always have something, and they almost never think to send it unasked. This is also the one task in this list that other people can help with, which is worth something on a day when they want to help and there is nothing to give them.

Put everything in one folder. Not organised, not sorted, not edited. One folder, everything in it, no decisions required. Sorting is a job for a version of you that is further along than the one gathering, and conflating the two is how people end up abandoning the whole thing halfway through an afternoon that was already hard.

Phones are lost, dropped and replaced, and cloud accounts lapse quietly when a card expires. Neither is a place where something irreplaceable should live alone. Once the folder exists, copy it somewhere that is not the device it came from — an external drive, a second account, or a computer that stays in the house.

Two copies in two places is the whole of the advice, and it is worth doing badly and immediately rather than well and eventually. A messy backup made this week is better than an organised one planned for a month you are not going to feel like it in.

If any of the pictures live only inside a messaging app, get them out. Photographs sent through chat apps are shrunk on the way, and the small copy is often all that survives once the original phone is gone. Ask whoever sent it for the file itself while they still have it.

There is no deadline on this part and nobody is waiting. Some people go through the folder within a week and find it steadying; others cannot open it for a year and then do it in one evening. Both are ordinary. The gathering had to happen quickly because things get lost; the choosing does not, because the folder is not going anywhere.

When you do come to it, the pictures that matter are rarely the technically good ones. The frame that catches how they sat, or the particular way they looked at you when they wanted something, will beat a sharper photograph taken on a better day. Owners recognise animals by behaviour long before they recognise them by anatomy.

It helps to pick a small number rather than a shortlist. Three or four pictures that each show something different — the face, the whole animal, one of them doing the thing they always did — is a set. Forty near-identical frames from one afternoon is still the folder, just smaller.

The most common regret people describe is not having printed anything. Files stay on devices and devices get replaced; a print on a wall or in a book is the version that survives being disorganised. A single good print, framed properly, does more than a hundred files in an album app nobody opens.

Beyond that the options are ordinary and that is fine: a photo book of the whole folder, a small print for other people in the family who miss them too, a framed picture in the room they always sat in. None of this needs to be elaborate to work, and the elaborate versions are often harder to look at than the simple ones.

Some people want a portrait rather than a photograph — something composed and printed properly rather than a phone frame enlarged. That is what the pet memorial portrait page is about, and it is made from the photographs you already have, which is the only thing it can honestly be made from. A black and white treatment is the one people ask for most often here, because it removes the incidental colour of a kitchen floor and leaves the animal.

Anything you upload to a website has a retention policy, and most of them delete after a matter of weeks. That is a sensible default for ordinary use and the wrong assumption to make here, because the pictures being uploaded may be the only ones that exist and the person uploading them is not in a frame of mind to remember an expiry date.

So the rule for this one case is blunt: download everything the moment it is ready, put it in the folder from the first section, and back that up again. Do not leave anything important living only on somebody else's website, ours included. If a gallery link is the only copy you have of something, it is not a copy.

This applies equally to print services, photo book sites and phone manufacturers' cloud storage. All of them are fine as a way to get something made, and none of them is a place to keep the only version of an irreplaceable file.

This section is for a different reader, and it is the only advice in this article that has a deadline attached. If you are reading this while the animal is still alive — because they are old, or ill, or because you have just watched somebody else go through it — take the photographs now, in daylight, this week.

Take the ordinary ones. Everyone has action shots and nobody has a plain, well-lit picture of the face looking at the camera, or of the animal asleep in the spot they always sleep in, or of their paws. The pictures people wish they had are almost never dramatic; they are the ones so unremarkable that there was never a reason to take them.

The practical part of that — where to stand, what light to use, how to get an animal to look up at the right moment — is the guide to photographing your pet, and if you only have ten minutes then what makes a good photo is the shorter version of the same thing.