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Our Story So Far
- April 01, 2026
Qphoto, your trusted memory merchant since 1984 owes ity’s origins to the pioneering South African spirit. We are an award-winning photographic printing company made up of many first time ever moments. We have built our company on the belief that do it properly or not at all, because only the best will do for us and our customers.
In the past people took their photos to the local pharmacist to be developed and printed in a lab and waited a week for their photos.. In 1983 Piet Geyser, a pharmacist from Pretoria, went to America and saw a Kodak Express one hour mini lab where film was developed and printed in an hour, he was so impressed and that he decided to bring the idea back home.
So in 1984, together with Kodak, he opened the first one hour photographic develop and print mini lab in Pretoria, a first for South Africa. With a pioneer’s vision and drive, he built a retail chain of twelve minilab photo printing shops in Pretoria called Express Foto.
Express Foto was a hit, for the first time people could get their photos printed in an hour and share their memories with family and friends without waiting for days. Express Photo was all about speed, but producing high end, top quality photographic prints and reasonable prices was what made it truly suceesful.
Keeping up with technology and innovation was another cornerstone of the business and regular attendance at famous international photography expos such as Photokina in Colonge, Germany was an essential part of keeping the company up to date with technology.
One of our keys to success is flexibility and the ability for reinvention, so when Kodak withdrew their products from South Africa in 1987 as part of international sanctions, Express Photo forged a strong new relationship Fujifilm, a Japanese company known for innovation and technological development. Express Photo was rebranded QPhoto, with the Q standing for ‘Quality” which an obsession of ours.
With the advent of digital photography Qphoto had to embrace the change again and we developed a wider range of product offering beyond photographic prints. Through international travel and relationships, Qphoto built the most specialized and largest collection of photographic printing equipment in Africa. We have equipment and technologies from Japan, Holland, England, Germany and Italy which enables us to produce a wide range of top quality printed products such as photobooks, printed canvas, photo gifts and many more.
From the early days, Piet would take his daughter Liezel to Photokina in Germany and she would earn her pocket money by working in his shops as a student during the holidays. In 2011 Liezel joined Qphoto and together she and her father transformed the business from a twelve shop retail chain into an online e-commerce business. The shops were closed and theequipment was centralised into a 1600 Sqm printing facility in Pretoria with an e commerce website as a shopfront. Liezel developed an app called MyLifestory with Samsung SA and headed many other technological developments to drive the online expansion of Qphoto.
At Qphoto We don’t outsource anything, all our products are made in house by our own hands, from cutting and stitching leather for an album cover to building canvas frames, we do it all ourselves ensuring that the end product measures up to our standards.
Our values of innovation, commitment to quality and creating value are paired with our most important assets, our people. We believe in paying a decent wage, providing benefits such as disability insurance and a pension. We invest and develop our people and our average length of service is ten years. So when customer’s receive a printed creation from Qphoto they can rest assured that the hands that made it are part of the Qphoto family.
We print and inspire people to create a printed legacy, tell the best story ever – yours.