Digitising The Archive

We have huge, huge news! We’re in the final days of digitising the whole Frith archive. This vast project will result in an extraordinary national treasure becoming accessible to all, in its entirety.

Starting in coming days, we’ll be publishing many thousands of new photos to the web site every week. Some have not been seen outside the archive for over a century. In recent years the number of digitised photos available from the archive has hovered at over 125,000. That number will now increase three-fold.

We’ll be publishing all the newly digitised photos over time, because, well, no one can enjoy and absorb this many irreplaceable historical photos in one sitting!

This project has been a huge challenge, undertaken at enormous cost, without public funding. We have used state of the art technology to ensure we have captured the very finest details from every subject. The original materials worked with have covered the gamut: hand-written ledgers and collodion glass plates, platinum, albumen & gelatin-silver prints, small format film and most things in between. Even with the best technology and processes, handling so many delicate and varied materials has made this a slow, laborious and complex task.

This digitisation project is in part connected to our new partnership with Ancestry. Starting this week, Ancestry subscribers will be able to view material from the Collection within Ancestry’s service. We are delighted that this partnership will embed Frith’s fabulous archive material into many family histories.

Every photo we have digitised will be available on the Frith site. You may continue to contribute your memories direct to the Collection of any particularly evocative photos, and all will available to buy in our expanding range of products, from prints to calendars.

We are extremely proud to be reaching a successful conclusion to this long process. We hope you are as excited as us that the fruits of this project will shortly be enjoyed by all.

To find out about new photo releases as they happen follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletters. If you have questions about the archive or its digitisation, please do get in touch.