Apple Digital Legacy Setup for Canadians — Who Gets Your Photos and Messages

A 67-year-old retiree in Mississauga dies in her sleep. Her daughter, named executor, knows that her mother kept twenty years of family photos on her iPhone — birthdays, holidays, the last visits with the grandmother, hundreds of pictures of the grandchildren the daughter has not seen in months. The phone is locked. The iCloud account is locked. Apple's customer service, when the daughter calls four weeks in, explains that without a Legacy Contact setup before death, the recovery process is dramatically more complicated — often requiring a court order from a Canadian court, which Apple may or may not accept.

The Legacy Contact feature, available since iOS 15.2 in late 2021, exists precisely to prevent this scenario. It is free, takes five minutes to set up, and is one of the highest-value digital estate-planning steps any iPhone user can take. This guide walks through the setup, the access mechanics after death, and how it fits into a Canadian estate plan. For broader digital legacy planning, see digital legacy planning in Canada and our pillar on estate planning in Canada.

What Apple Digital Legacy actually does #

Apple Digital Legacy (officially called Legacy Contact) is a feature that lets you designate one or more people — Apple's documentation says you can add more than one, and reports at launch put the cap at five — who can request access to your Apple Account data after you die. The technical mechanism — Apple generates a cryptographic access key when you add a contact; that key plus a copy of your death certificate is what the contact submits to Apple after your death to unlock the request.^[2]

What the Legacy Contact gets:^[1]

• Photos and videos stored in iCloud Photos
• Messages stored in iCloud (where Messages in iCloud is enabled)
• Mail (iCloud Mail accounts)
• Notes
• Reminders
• Calendars
• Contacts
• Files in iCloud Drive
• Voice Memos
• Device backups (iPhone and iPad backups stored in iCloud)
• Apple Books bookmarks and PDFs

What the Legacy Contact does not get:

• Passwords, passkeys, and any data in iCloud Keychain
• Payment information
• Movies, music, books, podcasts, or apps purchased through the Apple Account
• Subscriptions (Apple Music, Apple TV+, iCloud+ storage, etc.) — these are cancelled when the account is closed
• App data that does not sync to iCloud (some third-party apps store everything locally on the device)
• Anything on the device that was never backed up to iCloud

Access is for three years from the date Apple approves the Legacy Contact request. After that period, the account is permanently deleted.

Setting it up — step by step #

On iPhone or iPad (iOS 15.2 or later):

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap your name at the top.
3. Tap Sign-In & Security.
4. Tap Legacy Contact.
5. Tap Add Legacy Contact.
6. Authenticate with Face ID, Touch ID, or your Apple Account password.
7. Choose how to share the access key — either send it through iMessage (if your contact is an Apple user), or print it. Most people do both.

On Mac (macOS Monterey 12.1 or later):

1. Apple menu → System Settings.
2. Click your name at the top of the sidebar.
3. Click Sign-In & Security.
4. Click the Legacy Contact section.
5. Click the + button.
6. Choose how to share the access key.

Repeat for each additional contact — Apple lets you add more than one. There is no Apple Account or Apple-device requirement for the contact; after Apple approves the access request, it issues a special Legacy Contact Apple Account that the contact uses to reach the data.

What to do with the access key #

The access key is a QR code and a string of digits. The contact needs it (along with a death certificate) to make their request after your death. Three places to store it:

• The contact's Apple device (if they have one). Apple stores the key automatically in their iCloud once you share it via iMessage and they accept.
• A printed copy with your estate planning documents. Print the key page and store it with your will, your power of attorney, and other key documents. This is the executor's path to the key if the contact has lost theirs or never had an Apple device.
• A copy directly with the contact. A printed page they keep with their own important papers.

Three observations are worth pulling out — first, the access key is what authorizes the request, not the will; second, without the key, the contact's only recovery path is a court order, which Apple may not honour for accounts outside the US; third, redundancy matters — printing two copies is cheap insurance.

After death — what the contact does #

When you die, the Legacy Contact's process:^[3]

1. Visit Apple's Digital Legacy access request page (digital-legacy.apple.com or a similar URL — Apple periodically updates this).
2. Submit the access key.
3. Upload a copy of the death certificate.
4. Wait for Apple's review — typically several days to a few weeks.
5. Receive an email from Apple with login credentials for a special Legacy Contact Apple Account.
6. Use that account to access the deceased's iCloud data for up to three years.

The Legacy Contact can download photos, copy files, export contacts, save messages — anything they want to preserve. Three years is intentionally generous to allow grieving families time to do this work without pressure.

After the three years (or earlier, if requested by the Legacy Contact), the Apple Account is permanently deleted. Anything not downloaded is gone.

What it does not solve #

Legacy Contact is one piece of a Canadian digital estate plan, not the whole picture. A few gaps:

Locked devices. If the iPhone has content that was never synced to iCloud — say, a folder of photos imported via USB that were never enabled for iCloud Photos — that content is locked behind the device passcode after death. Apple cannot and will not bypass the device passcode. Best practice — verify that iCloud is syncing everything that matters.

Passwords. iCloud Keychain is excluded. Banking app passwords, email-account passwords (other than the iCloud Mail account), social media passwords — all stay locked. A separate password manager (1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane) with its own legacy access mechanism is the typical solution. See password vaults in estate planning.

Photo content shared with others. If you and a spouse share family photos through Shared Albums or shared iCloud accounts, the Legacy Contact's three-year window may not match the surviving spouse's longer-term needs. Download and reorganize early.

Purchased media. Movies and music purchased through the Apple Account are not transferable. A separately licenced copy is the only path to keeping the content.

Non-Apple cloud services. Anything stored in Google Photos, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. requires its own legacy mechanism (see Google Inactive Account Manager). Apple Legacy Contact only addresses Apple's own iCloud data.

How it fits into a Canadian estate plan #

The Legacy Contact setup is best treated as a complement to, not a substitute for, the traditional Canadian estate plan documents. A complete digital estate picture for an Apple-using Canadian includes:

• A Canadian will that addresses digital assets generally (often a clause directing the executor to deal with digital accounts in accordance with each service's terms).
• The Apple Legacy Contact setup with access keys distributed.
• Equivalent legacy settings on other major services (Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook Legacy Contact, etc.).
• A password manager with its own emergency access protocol.
• A Life Discovery Kit document that captures the existence of these accounts and where the access keys are stored.
• An executor or trusted person who knows the digital plan exists.

Three patterns to avoid — first, setting up the Legacy Contact and never telling the contact about it; second, naming the executor as the only Legacy Contact, when a tech-comfortable family member may be better positioned; third, treating Apple Legacy Contact as covering your full digital life when it covers only Apple's services.

Privacy and PIPEDA considerations #

Apple is a US company processing personal data of Canadian users. The Legacy Contact mechanism is governed by Apple's terms of service, not directly by Canadian privacy law. PIPEDA^[4] applies to the Canadian user during their lifetime; after death, personal-information protection rules vary by province and are evolving. Apple's privacy posture (in particular, the deliberate exclusion of Keychain from Legacy Contact access) is more restrictive than what Canadian probate law might require — and for most users, that conservative default is acceptable.

When to revisit the setup #

Refresh the Legacy Contact every few years and after any significant life event:

• Death or estrangement of a current Legacy Contact.
• Significant new content stored in iCloud (a major photo collection migration, an expanded use of iCloud Drive).
• Changes in your Apple Account (new email, new password, two-factor authentication changes).
• Updates to Apple's terms (Apple has revised the Legacy Contact terms periodically since 2021).

Add a 2-yearly calendar reminder. The setup is cheap; the cost of having it stale is occasionally large.

What we focus on at It's Simple Will #

The Apple Digital Legacy setup is a free five-minute task that prevents the most common digital-assets failure mode in Canadian estates — locked iPhone, locked iCloud, family photos that exist but cannot be reached. Pair it with a Canadian will at app.itssimplewill.ca and the Life Discovery Kit that records where your access keys, password vault recovery codes, and other digital-asset references are stored. For the broader digital picture, see our Google Inactive Account Manager primer and password vaults in estate planning.