St. Andrews Library Special Collections

St Salvator’s Chapel, St Andrews, Hill & Adamson, 1848

Scott Monument, Edinburgh; James Valentine, 1878

Children on Mingulay; Robert M. Adam, 1905

Bing Crosby on the Old Course; George M. Cowie, 1950

Image Database

George M Cowie

The work of local press photographer George Cowie (1902-1982) dates from ca.1930 and covers every aspect of life in St Andrews and its famed golf courses, and of rural and coastal East Fife.

Early Photographs

St Andrews University holds an internationally renowned archive of early photography. This stems from the fact that St Andrews played a vital role in the development of photographic processes, due to the initiative of Principal Sir David Brewster.

G Allan Little

G Allan Little, freelance photographer and photo-journalist, works covering many diverse Scottish and local (North Fife and Tayside) subjects.

James Valentine & Co

Often regarded as only postcard publishers, Valentines produced images in various formats including fine early photographic prints. The archive incorporates many original prints, negatives and albums as well as view registers and business papers.

William M Jack

The 864 architectural slides of William Murray Jack (1921-1999), architect and historic buildings advisor and restorer, relate mainly to buildings in Fife, and range from dovecotes to castles.

Printed Books

Illustrations, especially of travel and anthropological subjects from 18th, 19th and early 20th century published books. These include hand-coloured engravings, photographs and photo-mechanically produced prints such as Woodburytypes.

Photographs in Albums

A growing collection of photographic albums containing a wide variety of images including portraiture and topography as well as reproductions of paintings and sculpture, dating from the earliest days of photography onwards.

Peter Willis

Peter Willis is an architect and architectural historian and his collection of slides, taken in the 1980s and 1990s, consists mainly of buildings by notable architects in Britain, Europe Canada and the USA.

Sir David Russell

Sir David Russell's collection dates from ca.1890-1955. It includes his family life and holidays on Mull and Iona and photographs taken at archaeological excavations in Istanbul, Turkey and Trebizond.

These are just a few of the many collections of photographs. For profiles of all our collections, click on the Collections button on the left.

This website offers you access to the amazing wealth of photography held within the Special Collections Department of the University of St Andrews Library. Here you will find masterpieces of very early photography from one of the world’s outstanding collections, as well as thousands of images taken by masters of the art, both professional and amateur, over the last century and a half. For more details of the collections, look at the about section below.

The various search buttons on the left enable you to browse or seek out subjects or themes; the Help page will guide you on how to use them.

You are free to download pictures from this site for your own private use. If you would like to obtain higher quality copies, however, or wish to make any sort of public or commercial use of them, please contact us, using either the feedback form below, or the contact details available in the further information section (where you will also find a price list). Some notes on copyright and reproduction conditions can be found in the Legal Notices section.

This site is under continuous development. Keep an eye on it, and you will see that we are regularly adding new images, as our long-standing digitisation and indexing project moves ahead. Eventually we hope to make virtually all our images available here, but if you do not find what you want, please contact us. We will also be pleased to receive any comments or corrections to the captions. In due course an e-sales facility will be added.

Here you will find images of Scotland’s oldest University, of St Andrews – ‘the home of golf’ – and its area, of the whole of Scotland, the UK, and many places throughout the world. There are photographs of people at work and at play; of buildings, places and events; of ships, trains and buses; of flowers and forests; of virtually anything you can imagine. Lose yourself here for while, and enjoy them!