If you really want to have a lasting legacy of documentation, then build it and send it. Send it early, and send it often. Be the most interesting person on Earth today for your group.

Chances are fantastic that nobody will want to volunteer to build it for you after you're gone. But if it's important for you today, then make it easy on them: Send it right now.

...or don't. Really.

Telling some great stories at gatherings while perhaps sharing a couple of visual-reinforcement photos on a phone is enough unless you're a Kennedy or something. A wonderfully-interactive story is worth a thousand photographs. If you've got interesting stuff to share, then it will be interesting to hear, and to interact with, and it will remembered.

For awhile.

The best stories won't be chosen by you, but they'll be retold and will ebb and flow, and will subsequently die in a generation or three at most, but that's OK: You'll be dead, too. Get over it. By generation 4, those kids won't know who Uncle Fred was anyway except for a kind of sleepy myth about the carefully-preserved BD M-Disc archives (whatever those are) that were binned by Aunt Sally two decades prior because even Aunt Sally didn't care anymore, and couldn't be stuffed to keep them.

So keep living, and keep making and sharing new stories. Give people something to remember on their own accord. Don't force it, just do it and share it. Remember: If you were never very interesting to begin with, then they'll just bin whatever you left for them to discover when you're dead.

So be interesting. Live a decent and good life while you have it. Share it; no secrets. If it seems worth sharing after the funeral, then it's worth sharing right now.

(Except! In the odd chance that you are a Kennedy or something, then: Hire biographers. Hire them early, and often. Get that money, and line up the publishing of that stuff while you can still direct the proceeds. This is the path to preserving a legacy in a way that others can see down the road. (It might make it all the way to generation 5! (But it probably won't.)))

So why is it that photos >20 years old just aren't that interesting any more? Because photos need to be augmented by memories, or by stories from others. Once they're just pictures... and once I'm gone... no more interest.

We'd never throw out old physical photo albums. We have a cupboard full of them that my mom left behind. Some of the photos in them are of people we didn't even know, and now won't even know the names of. We keep them because we still have a little bit of connection to them - we knew the people to whom they were significant. But soon they'll just be landfill.

That's how human memory must work. We can't have every generation leave behind hundreds of thousands of pictures, piling up forever. Memories of past generations get purged until 2-3 generations back they're forgotten.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule. An uncle was persuaded to write his memoirs about his childhood on the farm in the middle of the last century. That will still be a good read after he, and those who knew him as a person, are gone. Assuming the books survive - it was a small, private printing only.

Whole lives of collecting sentimental goods all end up going in a giant bin, a whole house cleaned out in less than 2 hours. Photo albums are rarely kept, they just go in with it all and off to the tip usually in a single morning.

What you think is important to you, is basically just trash to your relatives/kids. They will probably have want they want before you are gone.

So my archiving needs are in the decades, not the centuries. If my kids can access them in 20 or 30 years, I will be happy.

I am skeptical of cloud services for such purposes because cloud services require ongoing maintenance: contractually, financially and technically.

The other thing I did was I ended up collecting HDD's out of old DVR's people were throwing out. Those drives are used for cold storage but not for anything important because they already have tens of thousands of hours on them and in not the best temperature conditions. Again, non have failed yet.

Funnily enough, the only HDD I have failing is a 2.1GB Quantum Fireball from 1997 in my Pentium 1! Really should swap that for an SD card via IDE.

If an album is well annotated with dates and locations and names and descriptions, it might be fun, but I suspect the number of old photo albums with this kind of effort put in them is rare.