About this archive
A public archive of the July Revolution in Bangladesh, 1 July to 5 August 2024, and after.
July Diary is a public archive of the July Revolution in Bangladesh — the thirty-six days from 1 July to 5 August 2024, and the weeks that followed. It exists so that what was photographed and filmed during those weeks stays reachable, in order, with its provenance attached, after the news cycle has moved on.
5 August is the hinge, not the ending. The archive keeps material through the end of August 2024, because the aftermath belongs to the same record as the uprising.
It is not a news site and it is not a campaign. It publishes what it holds and says plainly how much it knows about each item.
What is here
Every photograph and every video is its own record with its own address, so it can be linked and cited on its own rather than only as part of a gallery. Records are gathered under the day they were taken. Alongside the timeline there is a memorial, filed by person rather than by date, for material that names people who were killed.
How material is dated
A date is the one thing this archive cannot be casual about, because the entire structure hangs off it. Dates come from the strongest available evidence: an agency caption, a message timestamp, camera metadata. Where the only available signal is a filename or a file's modification time, the date is recorded as low-confidence and the item is held back rather than filed under a day it may not belong to.
Where an item cannot be dated at all, it stays in the catalogue unpublished. That is a deliberate choice: a wrong date is worse than a missing one, because it quietly corrupts the record of what happened when.
Duplicates
The same photograph was forwarded through many channels during the protests, arriving re-compressed, cropped or watermarked. Copies are matched perceptually, by what the image looks like rather than by its bytes, and only the best copy of each is published. The rest stay catalogued and point at it.
Credit and rights
Credit is shown where the chain of custody is actually known. Where an item reached the archive through a forwarding channel rather than from the person who made it, the page says so instead of guessing at a name. Items whose authorship has not been established are marked TBA rather than attributed to whoever supplied the folder.
A large part of this material is agency preview imagery and carries watermarks. The archive does not own it and grants no one the right to republish it. Nothing here should be read as a licence.
Corrections
Much of this material arrived with no caption. If you recognise a street, a building, a time of day or a person, or if a date looks wrong, say so — every record carries a way to send a correction, and each one is checked against the other records from that day before anything changes. Corrections about dates and about wrongly matched duplicates are the most useful, and the most common.
Nothing contributed to this archive is deleted. Material that is not published is held, with the reason recorded against it, and every such decision is reversible.