About Us

Our Partners

Gillman & Soame

In conjunction with Gillman & Soame, My Old School Photo was established to bring their enormous back catalogue of images to a wider audience. Started by a wigmaker in 1856 Gillman & Soame went on to win a Royal Warrant in 1867 and have been photographing royalty through the years, up to and including the current royal family. They have now been taking school photographs for over 150 years, with the original film from all these old school photos sitting in two large safes.

Gillman & Soame were on hand in 1954 with a 8mm camera to film Roger Bannister's historic four minute mile!

Their patented staging system has allowed them to photograph large groups of school children throughout the years. And these school photographs are now available for you to own.

Panora Collection

Started in 1916, Panora Ltd of Clerkenwell, London, produced panoramic photographs of school and college groups. The Panora negatives were deposited with the DPA (Documentary Photography Archive) in 1986 by the managing director of the firm who had sold his business but retained the negatives. The photographs are dated from 29 September 1968 to 30 July 1985.

This collection was held at the Greater Manchester County Record Office. It is now available from Gillman & Soame who have acquired the copyright of the images. The collection contains approximately 4,500 negatives (some of which are over a metre in length).

To see if your school is in the Panora collection click here.

Who we are

Myoldschoolphoto.co.uk was created to build the largest central database of old school photographs. We have contact with various archive sources to give you access to over 70,000 old school photographs.

The collections predominentlly come from Gillmon & Soame, Panora and Hills & Saunders. However we are always interested in hearing from other archive collections.