Fortepan was created in 2010 by Miklós Tamási and Ákos Szepessy, who met while attending the Kaffka Margit High School in the late 1980s.

Sharing an interest in old photographs, they started to collect discarded prints and especially negatives from family collections, which they found at flea markets, in the streets of Budapest during "lomtalanítás" (Budapest's annual junk clearances held at different times of year across the city), and estate sales.

[1][2] Tamási and Szepessy stored their found photos, mostly negatives, in paper bags, and forgot about them until the 2000s, when they concluded these images might be worth sharing.

[5] The new public archive was launched on August 20, 2010, featuring full-size photos organized chronologically along a timeline and controlled by a slider.

[7][8] As Miklós Tamási noted in a 2021 interview with investor György Simó, "Something was needed to link the photos together and there is no better tool than time.

Ákos Szepessy left the project early on to pursue other interests and Tamási became the sole visionary behind the Fortepan archive.

The photo project complimented Tamási's day job as Program Director for the Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA), a division of Central European University, which involved curating exhibitions.

One volunteer also initiated a public forum through which to discuss and "codebreak"– identify locations, dates, events and people – select photos.

In 2018, Tamási began collaborations with photo editor and curator István Virágvölgyi of the Robert Capa Center in Budapest towards an invited museum exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery (Magyar Nemzeti Galéria), the first time the Fortepan archive had such a high-profile public platform.

The exhibition launched in April 2019 with record-breaking attendance, to the point that the Gallery scheduled a 6-week extension past its initial four-month run.

[17] The first permanent non-digital exhibition of Fortepan, KultúrFényPont, can be seen at Fény utca market near the Mammut Mall in District II.

As a result, a Fortepan user enters the archive at a point in time, for example, the 1930s, and sees images from multiple collections that share the same date.

The selected images often include details of public life, such as clothing, streetscapes, house and building interiors, technical equipment, motorized vehicles, fairs and festivals, holiday traditions, emotional moments in Hungarians' lives, or photos that are artistically beautiful.

Furthermore, the Fortepan Forum invites the public to engage with the archive by adding information to help understand the backstory or content of a photograph.