Save Your Photos Day – September 26, 2026

History of Save Your Photos Day

The word Photography was first used in the 1830s. It was derived from the Greek words ‘photos’ meaning ‘light’ and ‘graphein’ meaning ‘to draw’ and supposedly coined by the British scientist Sir John Herschel.

Before the digital camera existed, there were earlier forms of photography that created images by playing with light and focusing it on specific objects that needed to be captured.
Heliography was the first type of photography, discovered by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1816. It involved using plates coated with bitumen and putting them inside an older prototype of the camera called a Camera Obscura. The plates were then exposed to sunlight for a significant period and the exposed parts became hard. The other parts of the plate were washed off. Imprints were thus made at first using sunlight.

The daguerreotype was another form of photography developed in 1837. It was named after Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. It didn’t create any negatives and used copper plates. The plate was exposed to a picture and sunlight for some time and then solidified with heated mercury fumes. After this, the plate would be washed using saltwater and the reversed photo would form. The daguerreotype was the first type of photography to have become popular in America.

There were other different types of photography like Calotype, Cyanotype, Ambrotype that were discovered at later stages. In 1935, Kodak introduced the color film Kodachrome. There were various processes involved in this, each using different colors of dyes like cyan, magenta, and yellow. Kodak was responsible for a lot of big inventions in the field of photography during this time. In 1975, Steve Sasson, who used to work at Kodak, was behind the invention of the world’s first digital camera.