Inventory: every place your photos are
Two sheets: every phone, computer, drive, card, disc, cloud account, chat app and social account that holds photos, with counts and space; and every account, with the date you last signed in and the rule that can delete from it. Stored in this browser only.
Essential on a first pass. Every other sheet starts from this one: you cannot check that a copy is complete, or know which account an inactivity rule will reach, without the list. A reader who skips it can still back up the phone in front of them, but will not know what was left in the old phone, the old account or the chat group. It is the sheet Taking stock fills and Getting photos out completes.
Places that hold photos
One row per place: a phone, a computer, a drive, a card, a disc, a cloud account, a chat app, a social account, a box of prints. A blank count means not counted yet; write 0 only when you have checked and the place holds none. The last five columns are filled when you copy from the place.
Accounts
One row per photo account, including old ones you no longer use. Write the account's email address or name so you can find it again. Never write a password or a code here.
How to use this sheet
- One row per place, not per photo. An old phone is one row; its photos in Google Photos are another, because they can differ (one may be full size and the other resized). A box of prints is a row too.
- Counts are what the place shows. Read the count where the device or service shows it, and compare like with like: an export can turn one Live Photo into two files. A blank count means not counted yet.
- "Only copy?" is a judgment you revisit. Tick it when you know of no other copy. Untick it only after a copy has been checked by count and by opening a few photos.
- The copy columns are a record of the check. Count at source, count arrived and the difference explained are what let you delete the source later; "keep source until" is the date you chose to wait until.
- Accounts carry dates, never passwords. The last sign-in date matters because Google, Amazon and Microsoft count their two-year rules from use. The services table gives each rule.
The example rows are from Nadia Brooks's inventory (fictional). Her old Android phone held 2,104 photos; 2,104 arrived on the drive, so the difference column is empty. The phone was marked "only copy" because its photos in Google Photos had been backed up in Storage saver, which resizes them. Her old Google account was last signed in in 2021; when she signed in it still existed and Google had emailed a warning, so the accounts row carries Google's rule and a sign-in date.
The inventory records what you found and counted. It does not prove that a copy is complete or that every file opens: the open-a-photo test in Backups does that. Opening someone else's account, including a parent's after a death, is a matter for the provider's own process and Learn Funeral Planning, not this sheet.