France, the cradle of invention, boasts a wealth of photographic collections that are preserved in archives, libraries and museums and by associations, foundations, companies, photographers and their beneficiaries. Not all of these collections are available online yet, and some have merely been identified.
The institutions depending on the Ministry of Culture and Communication that have put policies into place to digitise and share their works are listed in the “Collections” search engine, where their photographic collections can be found. However, without a tool specific to photography, searching for information about a photographic work can be an arduous and complicated task, with information often scattered across multiple structures. An example of this is the identification of prints that come from the same negative but are held by multiple owners.