Designating in a Will what will happen to my images

Have you thought about donating to a university or some wildlife group?

Yes, concur. Or special collection libraries may be of interest. Also check for online digital libraries.

Print out the best ones and donate prints as well.

If you can't find anyone, give me hi-res copies and I will put them on the Internet Archive. Or you could do it. I have a massive archival collection. But nothing really about nature. I'm willing to start one. Also Wiki Commons. But I don't like as well. They demand commercial use and delete a lot of what I put up.

William is correct - estate law is state-by-state. You need a local lawyer if you want anything reliable.

 

Vivian Meier is also a good example because there were these people who bought prints, negatives and exposed film but the copyright goes to whoever is her intestate heir under Illinois law. I lost track of what is going on in that case but last I saw one of the owners of copies was going through European birth records trying to find an heir so that he could get a copyright license.

 

For most of us, if we want our works to live on the most important and difficult thing is to get a person or organization to actually do something with it. That’s been on my mind lately because my father passed away, leaving a large archive of his research on Freud (he was a psychiatrist and had published historical articles on Freud’s work) and many gigs of digital photos. A prominent Freudian society wanted the academic archive but I’m still not sure whether to try to do anything with the photos. If I had any web development skills I’d set up some nonprofit online museum that people could donate their deceased relatives’ photos to.

This stuff has to be done while alive. Someone that is not in the know may not come through.

What about following Brett Weston's path and burning everything letting the next generation create their own images.

Let's say you have some really cool images that people want to actually use down the road - hypothetically. As a wildlife photographer your archived images could very easily miscommunicate what is actually out there anymore and while the thought of the images providing some altruistic info for future knowledge may be tantalizing more than likely if they are actually used it will likely be to promote some unforeseen commercial endeavor that you may very well not of agreed with. As for a will protecting that, well it's hard enough for photographers to protect their images when they are alive and want to fight against the infringers.

Reading the original question again, I don't see much mention of monetary value.

If others are likely to delete them, it seems that they don't, either.

I have many pictures that might have sentimental value to various people.

Some pictures, back to elementary school 50 years ago, are now on

Facebook, and have been tagged. Many that I never got around to printing

so many years ago, are now scanned and available.

As mentioned above, one possibility is to release them to public domain, possibly

through a web site specifically for that purpose.