The Danish Armed Forces Media Archive

The Danish Armed Forces Media Archive continuously collects photos and video from the activities of the Armed Forces. This includes both current and historical material, which employees and volunteers register and organize so that it is preserved for posterity and can contribute to communicating stories about the Armed Forces.

The Danish Armed Forces Media Archive also houses an extensive collection of moving images spanning from the period before the First World War to current drone footage. It consists of both digitized and analog material. Most of the collection is registered in the Media Archive.

First and foremost, the Media Archive is an archive for material recorded by employees of the Armed Forces, but there is also a tradition of former employees or their relatives donating photos and video/film recordings to the archive.

One of the individuals who has contributed many photos to the archive is officer Knud Leander Hansen (1926–2019). The collection includes pictures from his domestic service as well as his three deployments to Cyprus. This photo is from 1966, showing him at his desk in UNFICYP's headquarters. Photo from Knud Leander Hansen's photo collection.

The Collection

The archive's collection consists of three main groups of materials: still images, audio recordings, and films.

Still images include, for example, digital photos in various formats, paper photos, negatives, positives, slides, or glass plate negatives.

The still photos originate from various authorities' collections. These include photos from the Armed Forces' Information and Welfare Service, the Armed Forces' Media Center, the Armed Forces Library (including the Naval Library), and the Aviation History Collection. It is an extensive collection of over 250,000 digitized and registered images. The history of the Royal Danish Navy and the Royal Danish Air Force is better covered in the photo collection than the history of the Army, due to the fact that many regiments maintain their own archives and collections. While there are general pictures from the most important events in the history of the Armed Forces, one should not expect to find photos of a relative who completed their compulsory military service at a specific station. In a few cases, one might be fortunate, but generally, the photo collection is not detailed enough for genealogical purposes.

Furthermore, the Media Archive holds many photos that have not yet been added to the digital collection.

The collection is continually expanded with current images from the Armed Forces uploaded by journalists, photographers, and other personnel. The historical part of the photo collection also grows steadily as employees and volunteers add new items. The archive regularly receives new archival material—for instance, from authorities handing over their archives, or from former employees and their relatives donating photos or videos from their time in the Armed Forces.

Audio and Moving Images

Audio can, for example, originate from digitized recordings in various formats, cassette tapes, DAT tapes, and reel-to-reel tapes.

Films come in a multitude of formats—from various digital file types to, for example, 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, and a wide range of tape formats such as U-matic, VHS, S-VHS, DV, mini-DV, and DVCPRO.

The content can be divided into two groups: raw footage and finished productions. Raw footage consists of unedited recordings that typically form the basis for finished productions, but it can equally well be recordings that were never part of a subsequent production. This in itself says nothing about the quality of the recording. Finished productions consist of both documentary and feature films.