Who gets your photos and email when you're gone? Set this up in five minutes.

Think about everything in your phone right now. The photos, years of email, texts, voicemail. Now picture getting hit by a bus tomorrow. Who else can get in?

For almost everyone, the answer is nobody. Left alone, your accounts go dark when you do. The photos get locked away and eventually deleted, with no one left who can reach them.

Apple and Google both built a way to hand a trusted person the keys, and each one takes about five minutes to set up. Almost nobody has done it, because nobody thinks about it until the worst possible moment, which is the worst possible time to learn it was never turned on. Here is how to set up both. Do it today, while it is a five-minute errand instead of a crisis.

The thing to understand first: this is a spare key you cut in advance. You are telling Apple or Google, ahead of time, to let one specific person you name request your stuff when you are gone. Nobody gets your password. Think of it like a digital will.

On your iPhone (Apple Legacy Contact)

Open Settings, tap your name at the top, then Sign-In & Security, then Legacy Contact. Pick someone you trust, and Apple generates an access key for them.

When the day comes, your person needs two things to get in: that access key, and a copy of your death certificate. Setting it up is only half the job. The other half is making sure the key actually reaches them. Best to save it as a screenshot somewhere they will find it, or print it and tuck it in the drawer with the important papers.

Legacy Contact passes along your photos, messages, notes, and files. It does not pass along the passwords saved in your iCloud Keychain. Those stay locked. If your passwords live in a password manager, that is a separate plan to make on its own.

On your Google account (Inactive Account Manager)

Go to myaccount.google.com/inactive. This one works on a different idea. Instead of waiting for proof that you have died, Google watches for your account to go silent. You pick how long, anywhere from three to eighteen months. If you stop signing in for that stretch, Google tries to reach you a few times by text and email first. If you still do not answer, it notifies up to ten people you chose and lets each of them download the data you picked for them. They can download a copy of the files, but they can never log in as you.

Apple waits for a death certificate. Google waits for silence. Neither one is a quick process, so if your family needs into your account the day after something happens, this is not the tool that gets them in. It is the long game, the one that keeps the photos and the email reachable a year from now instead of gone forever.

So here's a thought experiment. If you died tomorrow, could the person you trust most actually reach the photos, the email, the account that runs your whole digital life? For almost everyone reading this, the honest answer right now is probably no. Two five-minute setups turn that no into a yes. Do one of them before you close this tab.

If you set one up and hit a wall, the access key step is where most people get stuck, so reply and tell me where it tripped you.

Joel