What to do with your pet's photos after they're gone

Why the camera roll is so hard to open

Photos of a pet who's died aren't like other photos. They arrive unsorted and out of order, so you can't brace for them - a random scroll can drop you straight onto the last week without warning.

That's why so many people avoid the whole folder for months and then feel guilty about avoiding it. You're not failing to grieve properly. The medium is just hostile.

First, gather them in one place

Before deciding anything, make one album and move them into it. On a phone this takes about twenty minutes: search your library by date range, or by the pet's face if your phone groups faces automatically.

This is a surprisingly good task for a bad day. It's mechanical, it has a clear end, and when it's done the photos are somewhere you chose rather than somewhere you'll stumble into.

Then choose the ten that sound like them

Not the ten best photos. The ten that sound like them - the one mid-sneeze, the one where they've stolen the good chair, the terrible dark one from the night you brought them home.

Most people find this part is where it stops being unbearable and starts being something else. You're not looking at a loss, you're picking out a personality.

Things people actually do with them

Print one. A single framed print of the right photo does more than a hundred on a screen, and it costs a few dollars. People are often surprised by how much this one helps.

Make a photo book. An afternoon's work through any print service, and it puts the years in order, which the camera roll never does.

Give a few away. The people who knew your pet almost certainly have none, and sending three photos to someone who loved them is a quiet, good thing to do.

Turn them into a short tribute. That's what we make: you upload the photos and write a few casual sentences about who they were, and it comes back as a narrated video - their real photos, your real words, in a warm voice, with music. It uses your own material; nothing is generated or invented. It takes about ten minutes to make and it arrives within a day.

Why making something helps more than buying something

This is the part most people work out on their own eventually. A keepsake you order and receive is pleasant but oddly hollow - the grief has nowhere to go in it. Something you actually assemble, choose, and write for is different, and grief researchers have a name for why: authoring a story about the loss is one of the few things reliably shown to help people carry it.

It's also the plain reason a pet death feels so unmoored. A person's death comes with a funeral, an obituary, food arriving at the door, a day off work - a set of things to do. A pet's death comes with none of that. You go to work the next day and nobody mentions it.

So whatever you choose, choose the version where you do the work. The doing is most of the point.

There's no deadline

If it's been two years and the folder is still unopened, nothing is lost and you haven't missed a window. People make these on the tenth anniversary as often as in the first month, and the photos will keep.

Common questions

My photos are old and low quality. Does that matter?

No. Old phone photos, slightly blurry ones, screenshots from a video - they all work, and they're usually the ones that feel most like the real animal. We gently sharpen and stabilise where it helps, and leave them alone where it doesn't.

Do you change or generate images of my pet?

No. We use the photos you send, as they are - no generated faces, no added wings or halos, nothing invented. An approximation of a face you loved is the one thing nobody wants.

Can I include video clips, not just photos?

Yes, and they're worth including - a few seconds of them moving, or of their name being called, changes the whole thing.