Requesting Photos from
Friends and Family
Create & Share a Request for Photos
Note, this assumes the user is an iPhone user. Additional information for other platforms will follow.
Compose a message to friends and family explaining that you have lost your cherished photographs and asking for help recovering them. Most people who have iPhones and other devices have a trove of digital photographs already, but anyone born before 2007 might be in photographs not stored on a phone.
SAMPLE MESSAGE
Dearest Family and Friends:
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As many of you know, we recently experienced a fire and lost many of our cherished family photographs. We are reaching out for your help in rebuilding these memories. If you have any photos of us, whether digital or physical, we would greatly appreciate it if you could share them with us.
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We have created a Shared Album called “Our Photo-Phoenix Album” in iPhotos and I have invited you to subscribe.
You can now add your photos to my Photo-Phoenix album while you are in the album by clicking the 3 dots on the upper right and clicking “Add Photos.” Your phone will then take you to your photo library where you can select the photo(s) to add.
You will be able to see and download all the photos that everyone is adding to the album until I delete you as a “Subscriber” to the album. Your added photos will remain in the album.
If you have physical photos of us, you can either take a good snapshot of them with your phone or you can scan them, or you can mail them to us at
[Address]
[Address]
I will gladly reimburse you for your postage.
Every contribution means so much to us as we try to recover these special moments. Thank you for your support!
Warm regards,
[Your Name]
If you decide to share a message about Photo-Phoenix or this process more broadly, such as on social media, please note that people won’t be able to join the album automatically. Anyone who wants to contribute or view photos will need to contact you directly, and you will have to manually send them an invitation to access the Photo-Phoenix Album.