Apple

There’s a decent chance that the iPhone syncs to iCloud each night. It’s a feature Apple kind of snuck onto people and most people don’t change. Photos are one of those things that gets backed up during this time.

Thing is, you need to get it connected to WiFi that it has connected to before and just leave it on the charger, probably best to do this over 48 hours and then try getting in. The backups usually happen at night time.

If you know the WiFi where he lived but can’t access it, you could trick the iPhone into thinking it’s the same WiFi by creating that same WiFi signal name and password and the iPhone will connect to that new hotspot you create with the same instructions. If it’s valuable enough to you, you could buy a router and set it up on yours at home with that information or go cheap and set it up on your phone’s hotspot. If you don’t know that one, any other WiFi network it once connected to should do. It just only works over WiFi at night.

Once that happens, you can try resetting his password on iCloud.com and see if that lets you in. Or see if Apple can help you getting into the iCloud account with his death certificate. I’m not sure on that last part, might need to check into it before asking just to make sure they don’t lock you out of it or something.

You may not even have to do the WiFi trick, it might already have backed up everything already and you can try getting into this iCloud account now and see if the pictures are there. They’re accessible over any web browser on any operating system.