Picture discs are gramophone (phonograph) records that show images on their playing surface, rather than being of plain black or colored vinyl. Collectors traditionally reserve the term picture disc for records with graphics that extend at least partly into the actual playable grooved area, distinguishing them from picture label discs, which have a specially illustrated and sometimes very large label, and picture back discs, which are illustrated on one unplayable side only.

A few seven-inch black shellac records issued by the Canadian Berliner Gramophone Company around 1900 had the "His Master's Voice" dog-and-gramophone trademark lightly etched into the surface of the playing area as an anti-piracy measure, technically qualifying them as picture discs by some definitions.

Apart from those debatable claimants for the title of "first", the earliest picture records were not discs, strictly speaking, but rectangular picture postcards with small, round, transparent celluloid records glued onto the illustrated side. Such cards were in use by about 1909. Later, the recordings were pressed into a transparent coating that covered the entire picture side of the card. This novelty product idea proved to have a very long life. In the 1950s and throughout the rest of the vinyl era, picture postcard records, usually oversized and often featuring a garish color photograph of a tourist attraction or typical local scenery, were issued in several countries. These and similar small novelty picture records on laminated paper or thin cardboard, such as were occasionally bound into magazines or featured on the backs of boxes of breakfast cereal, are usually not classed with the larger and sturdier discs that were sold in record stores or used as promotional gifts by record companies, but a few featured famous performers and are now eagerly sought by collectors of those artists' records.

The first picture discs of substantial size, sold as records meant only to be looked at and played, not put into a mailbox, appeared in the 1920s. Their first wave of significant popularity did not arrive until the start of the 1930s, when several companies in several countries began issuing them. Some were illustrated with photographs or artwork simply designed to be appropriate to the musical contents, but some graphics also promoted films in which the recorded songs had been introduced, and a few were blatant advertising that had little or no connection with the recording. Some politicians and demagogues explored the potential of the discs as a medium for propaganda. Adolf Hitler and British fascist Oswald Mosley were each featured on their own special picture discs.

Most of these records were made of a simple sheet of fairly thin printed cardboard with a very thin plastic coating and their audio quality was substandard. Some were more sturdy and well-made and they equaled or actually surpassed the audio quality of ordinary records, which were still made of a gritty shellac compound that introduced a lot of background noise. In 1933, RCA Victor in the U.S. issued a few typical cardboard-based picture records but was unhappy with their quality and soon began making an improved type. A rigid blank shellac core disc was sandwiched between two illustrated sheets and each side was then topped with a substantial layer of high-quality clear plastic into which the recording was pressed. Like nearly all records being made for the general public, they were recorded at 78 rpm, but one issue was recorded at 33⅓ rpm, a speed already in use for special purposes which Victor was then unsuccessfully attempting to introduce into home use. It was the first 33⅓ rpm picture disc and the only one made until many years later. These were deluxe picture discs, priced much higher than ordinary records, and they sold in very small numbers. In the early 1930s the entire record industry was being devastated by a worldwide economic depression and the proliferation of the new medium of radio, which made a wide variety of music available free of charge. Picture discs of all kinds were among the casualties.

With the Great Depression and World War II no longer around to interfere with such modest luxuries, the picture disc reemerged in 1946, when Tom Saffardy's Sav-Way Industries began issuing Vogue Records. Vogues were a well-made product physically similar to RCA Victor's improved 1933 issues except that their core discs were aluminum instead of shellac. The Victor discs had been illustrated in high Art Deco style, often in sober but elegant black-and-white. Vogue's discs featured artwork done in the styles typical of 1940s commercial illustration and pin-up art, most of it gaudily colored, some dramatic, some humorous, some very cartoonish. The audio quality was excellent by contemporary standards and they featured professional talent, most with names known to the general public, but Vogue was handicapped by the lack of any big "hit" names. Top-tier talent was usually under exclusive contract to companies such as Mercury Records, for whom Sav-Way manufactured special attention-grabbing, quiet-surfaced picture discs that Mercury distributed only to radio disc jockeys. Vogue records retailed for US$1.05, about fifty percent more than ordinary ten-inch 78 rpm records. The novelty of the colorful discs attracted interest and sales at first, but success proved elusive and Vogue went out of business in 1947 after fewer than 100 catalog items bearing the Vogue logo had been issued.

More commercially successful and long-lived were some of the children's picture discs marketed by the Record Guild of America from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Their most popular and well-known issues resembled Vogue records in their general style of illustration and use of high-quality materials, but they were only 7 inches in diameter, had no reinforcing core disc, and sold for a much lower price. Other companies such as Voco also made picture discs for children.

Red Raven Movie Records, introduced in 1956, were a very unusual type of children's picture disc. They featured a sequence of sixteen interwoven animation frames arrayed around the center and were to be played at 78 rpm on a turntable with a short spindle, on which a small sixteen-mirrored device, a variety of the praxinoscope, was placed. Gazing into this as the record played, the user saw an endlessly repeating high-quality animated cartoon scene appropriate to the song. Only the earliest Red Raven discs, which were of the coated cardboard type but reinforced with a metal rim and spindle hole grommet, were true picture discs. The more common later issues were larger "picture label discs" made of solid colored opaque, translucent or transparent plastic, with the recording in a band surrounding a very large label that carried the animation graphics. In the 1960s similar products were introduced in several countries under various brand names—Teddy in France and the Netherlands, Mamil Moviton in Italy, etc.