What Is The Ford Heritage Vault? (And Why FOMOCO Fans Should Know)
If you're looking for official vintage photographs of old Ford, Edsel, Mercury, Merkur, and Lincoln cars, the Blue Oval has you covered. In June 2022, exactly 119 years after it was founded, the automaker launched the Ford Heritage Vault, which contains tens of thousands of curated photos showing various vehicles (including some rare concepts), brochures, places, and events from the company's long history.
The best part about this collection of photos is that they are free for personal use, and you can easily download them from the portal. Journalists can also use these photos in articles, as they are also free to use for editorial purposes, and all of this makes the Ford Heritage Vault an extremely valuable resource.
It features photos of vehicles built between 1896 and the present day, and more will be added over time as the manufacturer's vast archives continue to be digitized. Ford started its archives around 70 years ago, but it's only occasionally made photos public, so the fact that so many were made available at once can only make fans of the brand — or anybody looking for photos of old Fords — happy.
You can find anything, from pre-1900 black-and-white shots of quadricycles to F-Series Super Duty truck brochures from 2022, and everything in between. The vault's search function is very helpful as it not only allows you to search by brand and model, but you can also search by year, place, and even color, and this should do a lot to help you narrow down your vintage Ford photo search.
The vault continues to grow
In late 2022, Ford added 1,600 new photos from its UK brochures to the Heritage Vault, opening it up to a British audience for the first time. So you can find photos of models like the Zodiac, the Anglia, the Transit van, as well as many rally and racing specials.
You can find many unique Ford concept cars in the vault, including the 1964 Aurora station wagon (pictured). According to the Detroit Free Press, Ford most recently added more never-before-seen photos of rare design studies. Around 100 new images were added, all depicting daring concept cars from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, for a total of 378 different concepts available on the site. The total number of images showing concepts is 1,844 right now, but it will continue to increase.
All of these recently added concept photos are only available at the Ford Heritage Vault; you can't find them anywhere else, and this is the case with many of the other photos it hosts as well. The number of photos has grown considerably since the vault was launched; starting out at 5,000 items (images and documents), it has now gone past 15,000, according to Ford.