Visibility has long been an important goal in European lesbian activism and an important means of political empowerment. Yet, visibility can also bring about an increased vulnerability for marginalized groups, especially in times of hate speech and an increasing political backlash. Moreover, we need to ask: whose visibility is recognized by whom, and on what grounds? In my paper I look at the ways both national and grassroot film archives recognize lesbian lives through collection and selection policies, through the use of metadata and via the curation of online access. Presenting case studies from the Swedish and British Film Institutes, from the Hamburg-based archive bildwechsel as well as the Lesbian Home Movie Project in Maine, this paper discusses the ambivalence of lesbian visibility after (amateur) film footage has left the safe space of the archive to be widely circulated online. The paper looks at legal and ethical challenges archivists are facing when dealing with nudity, lesbian affection and other representations which challenge hegemonic heteronormative scopic regimes. How can an ethically conducted archival practice be guaranteed? How can archives avoid making lesbian lives invisible again? This paper presents some of the results of my research project “The Cultural Heritage of the Moving Image” (Swedish Research Council 2016-2018).