Historic England’s website which displays images from its archive and its Aerial Photo Explorer service is partly offline as a third-party supplier has ceased trading and entered administration. Historic England (HE) has advised users that it will be displaying preview versions of its images but that ‘it may take several weeks to make available the full image set due to the volume of images we have in our Archive’.
Historic England has over 1.7 million online records, which includes hundreds of thousands of digitised photographs and aerial images across several platforms including over 540,000 on its Aerial Photo Explorer and 600,000 on England's Places out of a total archive of around 15 million items.
The supplier is believed to be Smartframe Technologies Limited which was founded in 2015. Henry Page and Shaun Walker from Mercer & Hole were appointed as joint administrators on 26 August 2026, after the company failed to secure additional funding needed to become self-sustaining.
Historic England has been a user of Smartframe's services for several years. In 2022 SmartFrame Technologies spoke about its image-streaming technology which allows high resolution images to be securely displayed and interacted with. It was used by Historic England for its Aerial Photo Explorer tool which used a Smartframe containing over 400,000 available aerial images. It was also being used as part of HE’s on-going main archive digitising programme.
As the piece noted its use by HE ‘is a great example of how SmartFrames and their interactive features can be used by image owners and publishers to fantastic effect’. It provided zoom-in functionality, full-screen viewing and maintained captioning with the image, all without affecting page loading times. For Historic England, the SmartFrame image-streaming technology provided image security through right-click and screenshot protection, and protection from image-scraping bots. It also provided detailed download and use analytics.
In 2024 Historic England issued a further £41k tender for the provision of Smartframe Technologies for the presentation of images on Its website.
In addition to Historic England, SmartFrame Technologies’ image-streaming and in-image advertising technology was used across a number of publishers, picture libraries and archives, and sports clubs and organisations.
Historic England and the administrators have been approached for comment.
