The Kent Photo Archive website is run and maintained by a small group of volunteers interested in restoring and preserving old photographs of Kent and making them available for the public to view.

It was originally created in 2004 as part of a lottery funded joint project between Maidstone Museum and Maidstone Camera Club. The project objective was to restore a collection of glass plate images found in the storerooms of the Museum and establish a database record together with high resolution digital scans of each image.

At the completion of the project the ‘Kent Photo Archive’ website was produced to fulfill the lottery fund requirement to make the images available for public viewing.
The fund was subsequently wound up once the ‘requirements’ were completed.
Since then volunteers have continued to work with Maidstone Museum to record and digitise other archive photo collections in their possession and to add them to the website.
Over the years the site has expanded by attracting interest from other ‘owners’ of historic images of Kent and – as of January 2019 – Kent Photo Archive included images from over 20 Kent Museums, Historical Societies and Private Collectors with a total of over 25000 old images, and nearly 10000 modern pictures taken at the same locations giving the viewer a ‘then and now’ comparison.

Further interest and participation has been generated through our  Facebook page –  ‘Finding Lost Kent’. This enables us to post, and have identified, many images of buildings and places which were previously unlocated.

Throughout 2019 work was done on updating and recoding the Kent Photo Archive website using the latest web building tools with the primary aim of  improving the site’s longevity and to give it a fresh up to date look.

Although retaining the basic format and design of the exisiting site, this rewrite removed some of the rarely used features which had been added since the site was first established in 2004, and also took into account how, and via what platform (pc,tablet,phone) visitors currently use the site.
All work continues to be ongoing and more images will be added on a regular basis. Other ‘collections’ will also be added as and when they become available.