By the end of the 1860s, it had almost entirely replaced the first-announced photographic process, the daguerreotype.

During the 1870s, the collodion process was largely replaced by gelatin dry plates--glass plates with a photographic emulsion of silver halides suspended in gelatin. Invented by Dr. Richard Leach Maddox in 1871, dry gelatin emulsion was not only more convenient, but it could also be made much more sensitive,