Digital Futures

This showreel highlights recently digitised material in IWM's film collection

In April 2025, the ‘Digital Futures’ project began aiming to preserve, document and increase accessibility to Second World War films and photographs. This showreel highlights recently digitised material from the first year of the project, including footage from Egypt, Burma, Greece, and VE Day celebrations. In the coming years, these items, and thousands more, will be accessible on IWM’s websites.   

IWM holds vast collections of film and photography from the Second World War

The collection comprises four and a half million photographs and forty thousand reels of film produced by official bodies, such as the Army Film and Photographic Unit, as well as military and civilian amateur photographers and filmmakers. They are a unique and vital source for the study of the Second World War, capturing this global conflict in extraordinary detail. 

IWM aims to digitise the entire Second World War film and photo collections in time for the centenary of the start of the conflict. 

The current project builds on IWM’s experience of an earlier Cold War digitisation project, launched in 2020. 

Have you heard about IWM's Digitisation upon Demand Service?

To facilitate requests for copies of films outside of the approved digitisation programme, IWM offers a Digitisation on Demand service. For further information please contact us with the catalogue numbers/titles of the film(s) of interest and we will provide you with a quote. 

Explore our Second World War Categories 

We have created a Second World War Categories page to aid researchers accessing our digitised film collection. It divides the collection thematically, as well as by key events.  Additional sub-categories representing the global conflict will be added at a later date.