The Euro-Photo project aims at digitising historical pictures from the archives of 10 leading European News Agencies and make them available to Europeana, together with a huge number of their historical pictures already digitalised. Pictures will be free of charge for educational or private use, duly taking into account IPR issues. An adequate resolution will be guaranteed to ensure satisfactory image quality to users, fully supporting in any case Europeana standards of quality.Pictures in these huge archives are among the most valuable historical documents of the last century. They record major domestic and international events (political, social, cultural, sporting), celebrities and daily life from the turn of the century to the mid 1990s.At present this common cultural and historical heritage is marginally accessible. Only a small fraction (2%) of the archives have been digitalised with limited availability at a national level and mostly to professional picture buyers.The project will focus on the targeted digitalisation and fully metadata enrichment of at least 150.000 pictures according to users needs, Europeana Themes and metadata standard. Moreover, agencies will make available to Europeana about 1 million of images already digitalised and captioned, currently in historical digital archives.The sustainability of the project will be based on the revenues stream coming from selling historical pictures by agencies to their current target (media industry) at an European level.Euro-Photo will strategically comply with the major standards for EDL (European Digital Library) like Dublin Core and OAI PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol Metadata Harvesting). Other national news agencies will be invited to join the project.The duration of the project is 30 months. In the last 12 months interoperable services and technologies will be functioning in a real-life setting (operational phase), making content available to Europeana,