Photographs, in the sense of permanent images made in a camera, were first created in the 1820s, with the earliest surviving photo dating to around 1826–1827.

Early invention timeline

  • In the early 1820s, French inventor NicĂ©phore NiĂ©pce developed a process called heliography to fix images produced in a camera obscura onto a photosensitive surface.
  • Around 1826–1827, NiĂ©pce produced View from the Window at Le Gras , generally considered the earliest surviving camera photograph from nature.

So what counts as “invented”?

  • Many historians treat the early 1820s, when NiĂ©pce first obtained durable light‑fast camera images, as the point when photography was truly “invented.”
  • Some sources highlight 1826–1827 instead, since that is when the first surviving photograph was made, while later developments in the 1830s refined and popularized practical photographic methods.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.