There is no good advice for this, and anyone offering a great deal of it should be treated with suspicion. What there is: a handful of small, ordinary things people do, one of which is what this site makes. Take whatever is useful and leave the rest.
Grief over an animal is often quieter than grief over a person, not because it is smaller but because fewer people around you treat it as real. That gap — feeling wrecked while being asked whether you will get another one — is most of what makes it hard. It is worth knowing that the gap is common and is not a sign you are doing this oddly.
Nothing on this page fixes that. A keepsake is not a treatment. It is just a place to put some of the feeling so it is not entirely loose.
Still Around is a free app that takes a few photographs of your cat or dog and draws a little animated version of them that lives on your desktop. They wander about, sit down, wash, and fall asleep in the corner of the screen while you work. You do not interact with them much. They are simply there.
It matters what this is and is not. It is not a recreation, it does not talk as them, and there is no AI pretending to be your animal. It is a drawing — made to your measurements, corrected by you, doing ordinary cat and dog things. The likeness comes from the photographs and then from you: after it draws them you get an editor for the coat, the markings, the ears, the tail, and you click one of their eyes in a photo to set the colour. Software cannot know what your pet looked like. You do.
Your photographs never leave your device. There is no server in this product, no account, and nothing is uploaded — the drawing is worked out inside your own browser tab and the pictures are gone the moment you close it.
That was not a technical choice. Handing photographs of a dead animal to somebody's server is not a thing anyone should have to do to get this.
Some people find a small version of their animal on the screen to be a comfort. Some find it is exactly the wrong thing, and that seeing an approximation of a specific animal is worse than seeing nothing. Both are normal reactions and neither one is the correct one.
If you are unsure: it is free, it takes a minute, and nothing about it is permanent. You can watch a generic cat and dog move first without putting your own photographs anywhere near it. And you can quit the app and the pet file stays on your disk for whenever you want it, or never.
It was built for two cats, Momo and Belle, and then it seemed unreasonable to keep it. That is the whole story, and it is the only part of it on this site that is about anybody but you.
Two are enough to start — one where they are looking at you and one from the side. Everything the drawing needs after that, you can set by hand in the editor. Old and imperfect photographs are the normal case here, not the exception.
No. It is free, there is no paid tier, and there never will be one for this.
Nothing. Your pet is a file on your own computer and the app runs without a network. There is no service here that could go away and take it with it.