"Unlimited Photos" on a Memorial Page: What It Actually Means

Look across memorial QR suppliers and you will find the same word on most of them. Unlimited photographs. Unlimited videos. Unlimited storage.

We do not use it, and this is the explanation, including the part that is uncomfortable for us.

We sell one of these products, so weigh that. But the arithmetic below is not a matter of opinion and you can check every figure yourself.

What the trade currently says

Taken from suppliers' own websites, checked 27 and 28 August 2026.

Three of those six commit to a number you could hold them to, ourselves among them. Notice that the ones giving a figure look worse in a feature comparison than the ones saying unlimited, which is exactly the problem.

Why unlimited is usually a bet

Storage is not free and it is not bought once. It is rented, every year, forever, from somebody who charges for it. A memorial page holding forty gigabytes of family video costs its supplier real money in 2027 and again in 2047.

So consider a supplier charging £35 or £50, once, with no subscription, offering unlimited storage for a lifetime. For that to work, one of four things has to be true.

1. Almost nobody uses much. This is probably the real answer, and it is not sinister. Our guess is that most memorial pages hold twenty or thirty photographs, because most families never get further than that. We cannot prove that, and as far as we know nobody publishes the figures, so treat it as a hunch rather than a statistic. If it is right, the average is small enough that the heavy users are covered by everyone else. It is insurance, essentially, and it works right up until you are the one with four hundred photographs and an hour of video.
2. A limit appears later. Fair use clauses exist for this reason. Unlimited on the sales page, a paragraph in the terms further down.
3. A charge appears later. The page stays, and keeping it costs something it did not cost at first.
4. It does not work, and the company stops. Which is the outcome nobody plans for and the one that ends memorials.

None of that makes unlimited a lie. It makes it a forecast about typical behaviour, presented as a guarantee. Our objection is narrow: on a memorial, the thing that must not break is precisely the thing an average is bad at protecting.

Watch for "links" doing quiet work

One phrasing worth spotting. Story Medallion offer up to 30 photographs and unlimited video links.

Those are different products. Hosting a video means the supplier stores the file and serves it, and it costs them every year. A video link means the video lives somewhere else, usually a video-sharing site, and the memorial page points at it. Linking is free to the supplier, which is why it can be unlimited.

Linking is not worthless. If a family already has hours of footage online, pointing at it costs nothing and has no ceiling. But understand what you have bought: the memorial now depends on that other platform keeping the video up, on somebody keeping that account alive, and on the link not changing. It is a dependency stacked on a dependency, and the reasoning is in how memorial QR codes work.

How much is 250MB, in real things

Forever Connected publish 250MB, which is the most checkable figure in the trade, so it is the useful one to work through.

• A photograph from a modern phone is commonly 2MB to 5MB. So 250MB is roughly 50 to 125 photographs.
• A scanned print, done properly, is similar or larger.
• A minute of ordinary phone video is commonly 60MB to 130MB. So 250MB is about two to four minutes of video.
• A minute of voice recording is small by comparison, around 1MB. Half an hour of somebody's voice is roughly 30MB.

The pattern that matters: video eats everything, voice costs almost nothing, photographs sit in between. A single wedding clip can consume an entire 250MB allowance, while half an hour of a person talking, which is the most precious thing on most memorial pages, barely registers.

This is why we set our limits the way we did. Photographs and voice are generous because they are what families actually want and what storage can bear. Video is capped at thirty minutes because it is the expensive one and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest bit.

Work out what you need, before comparing anybody

Ten minutes with your own phone will tell you more than any feature table.

1. Search their name in your photos app. Look at the number it returns. Most people are surprised.
2. Ask two relatives how many they have. Roughly. You are looking for the order of magnitude, not a count.
3. Count the video honestly. Not how much exists, but how many minutes you would genuinely put on a memorial page. It is usually far less than people first say.
4. Look for voice. Saved voicemails, background audio in family videos, answerphone greetings. Whatever you find, it is small in storage terms and it is the thing you will value most in twenty years.

If the answer is thirty photographs and no video, every supplier on this page holds it comfortably and you should buy on price, material or shape instead. If it is four hundred photographs and half an hour of your father talking, the differences become real and you should ask direct questions.

What to ask any supplier, us included

1. What is the actual limit, in photographs or megabytes? If the answer is unlimited, ask again for a number, and ask where fair use is defined in the terms.
2. Is video hosted by you, or linked from elsewhere?
3. What happens if I exceed it? Blocked, charged, or is older material removed? The third answer is the one to walk away from.
4. Can I download everything, as ordinary files, at any time? If yes, no limit anywhere can cost you the material itself.

A supplier who answers all four plainly is worth buying from, whoever they turn out to be.

Our position, and its weakness

Every page we sell holds 1,000 photographs, 30 minutes of video and 30 minutes of voice. That is not unlimited and we do not describe it as such. If you run out, we will arrange more space for a one-off fee, and nothing already added is ever removed.

The weakness, stated plainly: on a comparison table, "1,000" reads as worse than "unlimited". We are aware of that and we have chosen it anyway, for the same reason we say the page is included for as long as we are trading rather than saying it is there forever. A figure and a stated condition are things you can hold us to. An adjective is not.

Our memorial plaque with memory page is £70, one payment, no subscription, with the page included for as long as The Life Behind is trading. If we ever stopped, our terms of service commit us to at least 90 days' notice by email and a full download of everything on the page, and you can download the lot yourself at any time regardless. Every supplier's figures side by side are in memorial QR code companies compared, and what to actually put on a page is in building a digital memorial page.

All supplier statements above were taken from their own public websites on 27 and 28 August 2026. Storage sizes for photographs and video are typical ranges for modern phones and vary with camera settings, resolution and length. Prices and terms change. If anything here is out of date or unfair, email support@thelifebehind.com and we will correct it.