Photo Collection of Toitū: Otago Settlers Museum
The Smith Gallery at Toitū: Otago Settlers Museum is a room filled with about 500 portraits of early settlers of Otago arranged in chronological order.  Curator Seán Brosnahan describes the ordering as "an aristocracy of arrival."  The top row are oil paintings, and the rest of the images are photograph fascimiles.  The Otago Settlers Association started the portrait gallery in 1908, and it has undergone a number of reconfigurations over the years.  At one point it extended into two rooms, and the position of the doors has been changed.  Display monitors in the Gallery provide biographical information on individuals pictured.  As of late 2025, biographies were available for about a quarter of the individuals; work has been ongoing to add stories for all of them next year, although information on the photographers who took the photos is absent. 

Brosnahan says the Museum's collection "has been built up over 120 years by people giving us stuff," and photo collecting has been a big part of that.  The Museum's website notes that one can ask to see "a manual index of over 7,000 photographic portraits held in our Archive" as well as "a collection of more than 4,000 individual photographic prints which are organised by subjects such as streets, suburbs, transport, and public events."  The Museum's collection is geared toward genealogical research, but its collection of subject photos on the history of Otago is strong and images are used through the Museum to provide context in the exhibits.  An example is the interactive exhibit showing shop fronts on Princes Street based on photographs taken by Daniel Mundy in 1864 supplemented by contemporary photos taken 150 years later.  The Museum uses Vernon cataloguing software; one shortcoming is that for many decades insufficient attention was paid to the provenance of materials, so that background information has been lost.

Toitū: Otago Settlers Museum is the oldest history museum in Aotearoa New Zealand.  Dunedin City Council took over operation of Toitū in 1991. Organizationally it is grouped with the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Chinese Garden under the direction of Cam McCracken.  The archivist position at the Museum has been vacant since the last archivist left in Dec. 2023, and there have been no moves to fill the post, possibly because the DCC has been grappling with significant debt.
Four volumes in the Research Centre list portraits in the Museum's collection, alpha by last name.  A reference number allows visitors to see the images on computers in the Research Centre, but there is no online access.  It is a grand ambition of the Museum to make a public interface with the Vernon system, but that objective will take years to achieve.
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