It used to be you could find a box of photos or keepsakes that you inherited to look back on how things were or when you were a kid. Now, most of that is stored on phones, and most parents probably don’t think to share or save them in a way to be passed down in the future.
I’m not sure that is the case. It’s certainly a trivial effort to switch on backups on your phone, but tge problem it that those backups go away at the same time your phone plan lapses. You’re not going to stumble across great aunt Mabel’s photos of family holidays, because her phone plan, and backups were cancelled when she passed away. It’ll be the same with parents too. Unless they’ve taken the time and effort to curate and share them, they’ll be gone with their owner. If you care about preserving those images, you need to have a conversation with people in your family, and arrange storage that will outlast you.
I’m not sure if google has such a feature, even less so I want to recommend people to upload their life to google. but ente photos has a feature to pass your pictures to someone as a “legacy”
https://ente.com/blog/legacy-kit/
I wasn’t sure what happens when a paid account stops being paid, but they say they will notify all legacy recipients after a year that they should do something: https://ente.com/help/photos/faq/storage-and-plans
its still not clear to me what happens if you had 80 GB of media and payments stop. but by this I think they will just deny new uploads and let you recover it for a year and some.
edit: no, its only 30 days with a subscription: https://ente.com/help/photos/faq/storage-and-plans#subscription-expires
Totally agree that the likelihood of an actual backup existing is almost zero, but the barrier to backing them up is also technically trivial.