Albumen prints were the common currency of photography for over 30 years during the middle part of the nineteenth century, just as resin coated Multigrade is for the latter part of the 20'th. To a Victorian they would not have been remarkable as a process, and today they are an interesting curiosity if only because they use egg albumen as one of the materials with which to coat the paper. Many albumen prints in museum collections are distinguished by their large size and by their spectacularly wide range of tones and fine detail.

This is less a tribute to the quality of the printing medium than the fact that the use of albumen coincided with the use of glass plate negatives, some of which measured up to 20 x 16 inches. Topographical photographers such as Frith used these large negatives in their travels to the Middle East and India. A contact print from such a negative would obviously give a print of very superior tonality and sharpness. The problem with salt prints was their tendency to absorb the chemistry into the fibres of the paper which resulted in a dull and sometimes lifeless image. So a new way of holding the sensitiser on the paper had to be found. The use of a sizing material to give a glossy surface to the paper was introduced by Blanquart-Evrard in the late 1840's.

The substance he used was albumen, more commonly known as egg-white. The beaten egg white mixed with sodium chloride was coated onto the paper, which was sold in packets just as it is today. The albumen paper was coated with silver nitrate immediately before printing, giving a modified salt print, with a glossy surface which appeared to appeal to nineteenth century taste more than the matt surfaces of other processes. Much of the albumen paper was made in Dresden in Germany. Armies of women were employed to separate egg yolks from the whites, beat the egg whites and spread the solution onto paper. In one year a factory in Dresden used over one million eggs and it was interesting to note that many magazines of the time featured recipes which used egg yolks as their main ingredient.