An online archive aims to preserve images of Glasgow life since the earliest days of photography

These images date from the days when photographs were to be taken seriously – rather than instant snaps uploaded to Facebook via a mobile phone.

The Glasgow Family Album is a lottery-funded project designed to preserve the flavour and heritage of the city through its favourite family photographs. With its launch exhibition currently showing at the Bridge arts centre in Easterhouse, volunteers have begun staging "scanning days", to record selected vintage snaps for a growing website collection.

There is, of course, no shortage of pictures of Glasgow life. An image search on Google for "Old Glasgow", for example, produces more than six million entries. Thus far, the Glasgow Family Album features only a few hundred. But the photographs, with the earliest dating back more than a century, offer moving snapshots of a sepia-tinted world, from grocery shops to dentist's chairs, or women under antique hair-driers. It's a place where children could roam back-streets in safety – though many have the look of the kind of urchins immortalised by the painter Joan Eardley.

The Cranhill Arts Project launched the Glasgow Family Album on a budget of about 50,000, with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of 41,300 and additional funding from the Glasgow Community Planning Partnership. Trained volunteers are visiting community organisations to start recording selected photographs, and pictures can also be submitted via e-mail.

"It's a people's archive – Glasgow and its people," said Chris Nicoletti, the photographer co-ordinating the site. "As it goes on over the years, we hope to get thousands and thousands in there. It's really to encourage people to look after their heritage. When people die and move house, the photographs just get lost, so we are going to preserve this for the future. This is an archive for the people, made by the people. It's a public archive; we are just the people who help get it online."

The collection is growing organically, picked by individuals who also contribute, rather than a single curator. The photographs are registered and captioned with whatever descriptions the volunteers can collect. They are organised by date, and also by subject matter. Sometimes details are hazy, especially when it comes to images that go two or three generations back. One elderly woman suffering from dementia offered a photograph of herself, unable to remember the grandchild who was with her. "Hopefully, people will go online, see a photograph and put more information on it. There's a space where you can put a comment," said Nicoletti.

William Scott, 80, features in a 1962 photograph, at a wedding with his cousin Jean. His family had the Craigend Farm in the east end of Glasgow – "all a housing scheme now", he said – and he delivered eggs from his van, nicknamed Willy the Farmer. A second photograph shows his parents with their vintage car, once said to have belonged to the Queen Mother, before his own mother began to suffer from the "creeping paralysis", the old name for multiple sclerosis.

"I've lived here since 1937, before all the housing schemes and everything was built," he said. "It's a good thing for people to see what things were like long ago."

For more information on the project, visit www.glasgowfamilyalbum.com To submit an image, e-mail