IF photographic giant Polaroid buys the Edinburgh photographic social media site Blipfoto , which has gone into liquidation, it will confirm the remarkable – if sometimes troubled – place that Scotland continues to have in the world of photography.

Blipfoto has grown from a tiny start-up a decade ago but since entering into a partnership with Polaroid last year in order to drive greater numbers to the site it has failed to meet the high expectations of investors, creating an inevitable pressure on cash flow.

It is unlikely however the new investors, based in Illinois, even know where Blipfoto’s home of Newhaven is. But that former fishing village on the shores of the Forth is not just of contemporary relevance – it is also one of the key places in the global history of photography.

Between 1843 and 1845 the partnership of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson – who had their studio in the Rock House on Calton Hill in the centre of Edinburgh – undertook an extensive project making 130 calotype images of the fishermen and women of Newhaven and in so doing became the founders of documentary photography.

Of course photography itself was only in its infancy at the time. The first recognisable photographs were being taken and shown in the mid to late 1830s although the oldest serving print is from 1825. The science and techniques of photography were constantly being refined and developed, and the Principal of St Andrews University, Sir David Brewster was one of those early experimenters. Amongst his collaborators was John Adamson, a doctor who taught at St Andrews. He took the first portrait photo in Scotland and persuaded his brother Robert to give up training as an engraver in order to start work with David Hill.

The great American photographer Paul Strand, whose book of images of the Western Isles, Tir a’mhurain, published in 1962, has become a rare, celebrated classic , regarded Hill and Adamson as the greatest early pioneers of the art but they were not the only 19th century Scots who made an impact on the world of the still image.

In 1859 a man known as the father of Russian Photography opened a studio in Moscow which at first had virtually no customers. With time on his hands William Carrick, born in Scotland, started to take pictures of the peddlers who filled the Nevsky Prospect. Icemen, woodmen, knife-grinders and many others sat or stood for these photographs under the title “Russian Types”.

When Carrick eventually secured royal patronage for his studio he widened his horizons, visiting many parts of the vast country, recording the landscape and people and creating an archive still valued today.

On the other side of the world Alexander Gardener from Paisley became caught up in the American Civil War. In 1863 he travelled through the carnage recording soldiers in uniform. His best-known image, President Lincoln on the Battlefield of Antietam has achieved almost iconic status.

This exodus continued for most of the rest of the 19th century. George Valentine , for example, was the second son of James Valentine, who founded the family photographic and printing business in Dundee. Serious ill health forced him to emigrate to New Zealand in 1884 and the following year his pictures of Otukapuarangi and Te Tarata – the celebrated Pink and White Terraces – won immediate acclaim. Following the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886 – and the loss of the Terraces – Valentine returned to the devastated region to complete a series that was unmatched for its quality and drama.

Scores of less celebrated figures also travelled from Scotland as working photographers, sometimes making trips in the summer from which they could fund other work in the leaner seasons. Some years ago in the Faroe Islands I was shown a family portrait from the late 19th century taken outside a remote house on an outlying island by a travelling photographer from the north-east of Scotland who visited every year and had a faithful clientele who wanted annually refreshed mementoes of their relatives.

Scotland also attracted – and continues to attract – photographers from elsewhere, drawn by the knowledge of the art form in the country and, even more importantly, by the scenery and people. Strand was one and he met, on at least one occasion, Dr Werner Kissing , the second son of an immensely wealthy brewing family in Silesia (now in Poland, then in Germany) who had been a soldier, diplomat and academic but who took some of the best studies of life in the Western Isles in the 1930s as well as making the first ever film to use spoken Gaelic. He also worked in New Zealand, taking important images of Maori traditions.

Modern Scottish photography continues to flourish, of course, at home and abroad. Albert Watson has international status as a portraitist with a keen but not uncritical eye while even sharper observation has come from Alicia Bruce’s work at Menie, which documented the actions and impact of the Trump Empire in the rural north-east. These photographers are also often fully aware of what has gone before them – Robin Gillanders, who remains one of our best and most imaginative portrait photographers, used the commission he got to record the first sitting of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 by paying conscious homage to Hill and Adamson.

If Blipfoto is saved many millions of pictures on the site will continue to be available. Many thousands more will go on being added every day and some of those will achieve almost instant worldwide recognition given the global reach of the organisation. Intriguingly many will still be Scottish.