Cities change all of the time, yet it is a truism that we don’t notice the changes from day one day. It is only when we look back that we see the remarkable changes that have occurred in our city.

Peter Stubbs, a lifelong member of Edinburgh Photographic Society, who died in 2023 recognised the value in recording and capturing places and people in Edinburgh’s everyday environment. He documented this in a remarkable website (edinphoto.org.uk) but, sadly, this was hacked and many pages are no longer available. Our hope is, eventually, to restore as much of this as possible and to integrate it with a set of new documentary images of the city. Peter also created a remarkably detailed history of EPS, which we have now restored as a PDF document.

The aim of this project is to continue and extend Peter’s work by collecting and maintaining historical and contemporary images of places, people, activities and events in Edinburgh. We have designed the system so that images are stored in an archival format and so should be accessible for many years. This website provides a view of some or all of the images in this archive.

We have organised the collection around four topics – projects by individual society members, people and places, events and activities, and themes. In this initial version of the system, you can browse images in each topic by clicking on the links below. As the system is developed, we hope to add other views (e.g. by date) and the ability to search images in the archive.