Fratelli Alinari, founded in 1852 in Florence, Italy, is the oldest photographic archive in the world.

Holding more than five million photographs, Alinari documents the history of Italy and the world capturing art, culture, industry, society and landscape. With over 200 years of irreplaceable images to protect, preservation for future generations is of paramount importance.

CHALLENGE

Some time ago, Alinari began a preservation project for its photographs, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, albion prints, gelatin silver prints, and colloidal glass plate negatives, where digitization was the first step of the project.

Through this project, Alinari discovered its current preservation strategy was not optimal and, given certain conditions, the image stability could disappear in just a few years.
Alinari needed a resilient, enduring medium to preserve their images and began seeking a preservation solution offering ultimate protection and longevity.

Piql’s storage solution has been tested and proven resilient to 500+ years and can ensure valuable assets and data are safely kept for future generations. PiqlFilm is considered an eternal data carrier, perfect for long-term preservation of history too valuable to lose.

So we decided today that Piql is the best solution available in the market to provide at an industrial level the most secure mechanism to preserve and store valuable media for the long-term.

Andrea de Polo, Fratelli Alinari

SOLUTION

The eternal nature of film combined with guaranteed future accessibility made Piql an easy choice for Alinari. Our secure and resilient solution gave Alinari the confidence that the images will live on long after we’re gone, without the need for migration as platforms evolve.

For a pilot project, Alinari identified over 500 19th century masterpieces, chosen for their cultural, historical, economic and educational value.

The images were transferred onto piqlFilm both as high resolution digital files and visual prints, before the reel was securely stored in the Arctic World Archive, Svalbard Norway.

The Artic World Archive is the perfect place to store world memory. It’s isolation, climate and status ensure data stored there will live on for generations to come.