The Ceylon Plates: Sri Lanka as the first cameras saw it

We turned a private collection of old photographs into ceylonplates.com, a free public archive. Victorian harbours, hill-country railways, ancient cities and the people who lived among them, in 1,598 prints that anyone can browse, search and help identify.

Visit ceylonplates.com

Project: The Ceylon Plates, a free public archive
Our role: Cataloguing, design and development
Stack: Astro, Pagefind, Cloudflare Pages
Launched: 2026

The Ceylon Plates homepage: Ceylon, as the first cameras saw it, with old photographs of sailing boats, a temple and Sigiriya

The brief

A folder of 1,598 old photographs, most with no caption at all.

The collection had been gathered over many years, mostly prints from the second half of the nineteenth century. The goal was to make it public without pretending to know more than we do. So every photograph is catalogued with a place, an estimated date and an honest label for how sure we are: identified, likely or uncertain. Each photo page explains how its date was reached, and visitors who recognise a place or a face can suggest a correction.

The collection

Browse by theme, place or era, or just wander

01
Filter and search
Seven themes, 24 places and three eras, with instant search across every caption.
02
A page for every photograph
A zoomable print, its certainty, how the date was estimated and links to more from the same place.
03
Honest about the past
Neutral descriptions, a note on colonial-era captions, and a clear way to ask for a review or removal.

The Ceylon Plates collection page: 1,598 photographs with theme tabs, search and filters for place, era and identification

The map

The island in photographs

An outline map of Sri Lanka shows where the photographs were taken. Larger circles hold more pictures: Colombo, Kandy, Peradeniya and the ancient cities lead the list. Choosing a place opens its photographs.

The Ceylon Plates map page: a map of Sri Lanka with circles for each place and a list of places with photograph counts

A photograph page on The Ceylon Plates: a fan palm in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Peradeniya, with its certainty, date basis, place and reference

Every photograph

What we know, and how we know it

Each of the 1,598 photographs has its own page, written to be found on Google, with sharing buttons and a "Suggest a correction" form. Nothing a visitor sends is published until it has been reviewed.

Certainty: identified, likely or uncertain
How the date was estimated
More photographs from the same place
A reference number for every print

Timeline and stories

A century of change, told in pictures

The Ceylon Plates timeline: a century of change, from the first cameras to a new century

A story on The Ceylon Plates: The line to the hills, about the railway to Kandy

The timeline places the photographs among key moments, from the first wet-plate cameras to trams in Colombo. Five illustrated stories, such as the railway to the hills and the move from coffee to tea, give visitors a way in beyond the grid.

Under the hood

The stack

Website: Astro, generating a static page for every photograph
Images: An automated pipeline with sharp, making AVIF, WebP and JPEG sizes so a full page of prints loads quickly
Search: Pagefind, a search index built with the site, with no search server to run
Viewing: PhotoSwipe for zooming into each print
Forms and review: Cloudflare Pages Functions and storage for corrections and contributions, with a private review screen
Hosting: Cloudflare Pages, serving the whole archive from its global network

Have a collection to share?

Photo archives, museum and heritage sites, or a large catalogue of products: we can make it fast, searchable and easy to explore.

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