Our Mission
At the Regal Photo Archive, our passion for historic photography runs deep. We are on a crusade to save the world's great historic archives, one by one.
We realize that many of them are in peril. Every one of us has heard the story of a great collection that was tossed in a dumpster a decade ago, when space became more important than dusty boxes of history. One newspaper we contacted sold its archive for $600 to a company that salvaged the silver out of the negative strips. Another newspaper held a "glass negative-breaking party," where staffers got together to chuck images from the 1920s into a dumpster along with beer bottles and trash.
Beyond these dramatic examples, there are the archives that have fallen to the simple march of time. We have come across spectacular collections where images chronicling World War II, early Beatles concerts, and America's western frontier have disintegrated into our hands. Negatives and prints don't last forever. The time to digitize them is Right Now.
"We are on a crusade to save the world's great historic archives, one by one."
PRESERVE restoration
We have created proprietary restoration techniques
Historic archives have a major liability: the marks and damage left behind by decades of use and storage. We know of newspaper managers who have spent millions of dollars to digitize their archives, only to realize that editor’s marks on the photographs have left the vast majority unsuitable for reprints or leasing.
The only way to unlock your collection’s true earning potential is through a painstaking restoration process that returns the images to their original form. At Regal Photo Archive, we have mastered this process. In our 15+ years working with vintage photography, we have created proprietary restoration techniques to remove editor’s marks, grease pencils, crop lines, and stains from photographic prints. We also digitally restore all kinds of negatives.
Before & After Restoration
Proprietary chemical-free digital and physical restoration of vintage prints
Drag the handle on any image to compare the original vs. the restored print
Vintage Studio Portrait
Editor marks & scuffs eliminated
Classic Figure Portrait
Silver tarnish & creases cleared
Historical Print with Editor Marks
Editorial grease pencil crop lines
PROTECT digitize & archive
We have custom-built negative and print scanners that can digitize more than 1 million images a month
The Regal Photo Archive can quickly provide you with a robust, fully searchable archive that is optimized both for internal use and for leasing. We have custom-built negative and print scanners that can digitize more than 1 million images a month – the fastest rate in the world.
We have marshaled a dedicated team of more than 300 archival experts who are trained to take outdated paper-trail photographic filing systems, dusty negative morgues, and vintage envelopes and transform them into sleek, functional, metadata-rich digital databases.
These steps, which we undertake using strict museum-grade quality control methods, both preserve your archive for posterity and maximize its earning potential.
1,000,000+ / mo
World's fastest custom scanner throughput
300+ Archivists
Expert cataloging, OCR & metadata tagging
Strict QC Protocol
Lossless preservation for master negative safety
PROFIT licensing
Iconic Images Licensing — RPA's licensing arm representing millions of historic images
Digitizing your archives isn’t enough. To realize its profit-earning potential, your images must be properly represented and promoted to creatives, content creators, publishers, social teams, and news media professionals worldwide.
Iconic Images Licensing, RPA’s licensing arm, is one of the most innovative licensing agencies in the United States. RPA and Iconic have more than 20 years of licensing experience, with clients that include ESPN, HBO, BBC, major broadcast networks, book publishers, and documentary filmmakers.
With Regal Photo Archive and Iconic Licensing, transforming your archives into performing assets is a simple, seamless process. No hassles, no headaches. We provide exposure and value for increased revenue and a stronger bottom line.
Have an Archive to License or Digitize?
Connect with our archive directors to explore digitization, preservation, or representation.
Our Company
Our story begins with a dream then a goal along with acquisitions of several archives which then led to licensing the images in 2000. Eventually we expanded that initial business and forged partnerships with publications, estates and photographers all over the world. Today we are stronger than ever still with our ever forward crusade to save the world's greatest historic archives, one by one!
At Regal Photo Archive, we are dedicated to preserving the priceless history captured through photography, recognizing that these archives are more than just collections, they are windows into our collective past. Sadly, countless historic photographs and negatives have been lost through neglect or misplaced priorities.
Each lost archive represents stories and moments that can never be recreated, highlighting the urgency of our mission to save and protect these treasures.