1827
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce creates "View from the Window at Le Gras," the oldest surviving permanent photograph made with a camera (heliography on a pewter plate, ~8-hour exposure)
1839
The daguerreotype is announced publicly in France by Louis Daguerre (gifted to the world by the French government), making photography a practical, mass-adopted medium and launching the photographic age
1841
William Henry Fox Talbot patents the calotype, establishing the negative–positive principle (paper negatives producing multiple prints) that becomes the structural foundation of all later film photography
1888
George Eastman introduces the Kodak No. 1 roll-film box camera with "You press the button, we do the rest," the first practical camera for ordinary people and the birth of the snapshot era
1925
The Leica I launches, proving 35mm movie film can make high-quality stills; its 24×36mm frame becomes the world's standard format and spawns the miniature-camera and photojournalism era
1935
Kodak releases Kodachrome, the first commercially successful color motion-picture and still film, opening the color era that dominates photography for decades
1947
Edwin Land demonstrates the Polaroid Land camera and self-developing film at the Optical Society of America, inventing instant photography (consumer Model 95 on sale in 1948)
1959
Nikon introduces the Nikon F, the first professional-caliber 35mm SLR system, cementing the SLR (over the rangefinder) as the dominant professional format for the next 40 years
1992
Lomography is born when students in Vienna found the Lomographic Society International around the quirky, cheap Soviet Lomo LC-A, creating the first "creative analog" subculture that kept film alive as an art and identity in the digital age
2003
Digital cameras outsell film cameras for the first time, the crossover point that ends film's half-century of market dominance (following 1997, the all-time peak of film camera sales)
2012
Eastman Kodak files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the symbolic death of the 131-year-old film giant that had dominated analog photography for most of the 20th century
2017
Kodak announces the revival of Ektachrome E-6 slide film (revived stock shipped 2018), the first major film-stock resurrection in a decade and the starting gun of the modern analog revival
2020
Pandemic analog boom: film camera demand surges (~61% higher in April 2021 than April 2020, ~90% higher than April 2019), with film shortages and price spikes that define the 2020s analog scene
2025
Eastman Kodak returns to direct consumer film distribution with revived Kodacolor 100/200, its first own-branded still film in over a decade, as the revival becomes big enough to restructure the film industry itself