Olive Edis was making professional autochrome portraits, still ifes and landscapes from at least 1912. She was elected to membership of the Royal Photographic Society in 1913 and exhibited colour work including at least two autochromes in that years Annual Exhibition. She was elected a Fellow of the society in 1914 and regularly exhibited int he colour section of their annual exhibitions until 1934. She patented her own autochrome viewer in 1914. The sale of autochrome plates was discontinued in the early 1930s when the Lumière company introduced a sheet film colour version called Filmcolor.

Olive Edis died in 1955 and bequeathed her collection of colour plates to the National Portrait Gallery which has the largest collection of her work.