This was once considered to be high tech. If you wanted a lasting image of your friends or family prior to the mid-19th century, you would have had to commission a professional artist or employ your own artistic talents. Then, in 1839, Louis Daguerre developed a commercially viable photographic process: the daguerreotype.
Our example is a tintype housed in a Daguerreotype-style case. First came the daguerreotype, then the ambrotype in the 1850’s, both superseded by the tintype as of the late 1850’s. Then, by the early 20th century, the tintype had given way to albumen (egg white emulsion) prints on paper.
Tintypes had an advantage over their predecessors in being cheaper, quicker, and easier to produce. Strangely, they were not made out of tin, but rather a thin sheet of iron coated with silver halide crystals suspended in an emulsion of lacquer, enamel, or gelatin. The use of iron as the support for the emulsion meant that tintypes are prone to damage by rust and flaking of the photographic image. There was no negative -- it was photopositive medium – so once the image was damaged, there was no means to reprint it.
There was another problem with tintypes – the preferred fixative for tintypes was deadly potassium cyanide. Now we have pixels and all manner of technology to capture images, and yet there are contemporary photographers who create tintypes as an art. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/garden/03tintype.html
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