About Found Photos

Found Photos is a public archive for found, rescued, and recovered photographs — slides, negatives, prints, and albums that were separated from the families who made them.

Every photograph here was once someone's memory: a wedding, a beach day, a first car, an ordinary afternoon worth a frame of film. Over the decades these images ended up in estate sales, thrift stores, and online lots, their people and places unknown. We collect them, preserve them, and try to give them back a little of their context.

How it works

Photographs arrive in collections — a box, a slide tray, an envelope, kept together as it came to us. Each photo gets a permanent ID (like FP-0004-SL-B01-009) that never changes, so it can always be found and cited. We scan it, clean it gently, and record what we can see and what we can find out.

Certainty, honestly labelled

We rarely know everything about a found photo, so we never pretend to. Dates and places carry a confidence level — confirmed, probable, possible, unknown, or disputed — so you always know how sure we are. A guess is shown as a guess.

How you can help

Recognize a face, a house, a storefront, a stretch of coastline? Tell us. Every identification adds a thread back to a real life. Use the “I recognize this” link on any photo, or support the archive directly.

Get in touch

Contact us with a question, a correction, or about a specific photograph.