Fortepan is a community-based photo history portal with nearly 200,000 curated historical photographs established in Budapest, Hungary in 2010.

It was originally based on discarded negatives found in Budapest during annual clearance days in the 1980s and 1990s. Negatives are still preferred as they offer the most detail. (We scan Leica frames at 4000 DPI.) These days, the hunt for old negatives has become something of a 24-hour project, with thousands being dumped every week.

After the spontaneous enthusiasm of the press, Fortepan soon became a kind of national grassroots institution, prompting hundreds of families to offer their negatives and albums, followed by a few institutions and a few professional photographers who no longer waited for someone to pay for their photographic heritage, but opted for digital immortality.

It is not easy to define the exact character of Fortepan as a collection. It is certainly not a fine art photography archive. It can be seen as a documentation of the rich cultural heritage of Hungary and, to a lesser extent, of Europe.

Fortepan can be described as an "alternative history archive" that is gradually replacing the official press images of the 19th century that have been deeply ingrained in the minds of ordinary people. The newly shared images are more sincere and take us into all walks of life, public places and family homes where few professionals ever clicked.