Photo Porst was a German distributor and retailer of many brands of cameras. It was founded in 1919 by Hans Porst in Nuremberg, Germany. For many years Porst bought cameras from other manufacturers, among them Adox, Agfa, Balda, Braun, Dacora, and Franka, and rebadged them. In the early years, it used the Hapo brand, an acronym of Hans Porst, from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s. Later on, the house brand cameras appeared under the PORST name, e.g. PORST compact reflex or PORST 135 BS. The Carena brand arrived in 1960 as the name of a movie camera made for Porst by Büro-und Rechenmaschinenfabik in Liechtenstein. It came to be used more widely by Porst as an brand name for a variety of cameras. The Carena brand was sold to the Swiss company Interdiscount in the 1970‘s for use by it‘s own camera retail business. In 1982 Interdiscount bought a majority shareholding in Porst, effectively reuniting the Carena and Porst brands. Interdiscount’s interest in Porst was later sold to the Belgian company Spector NV. Interdiscount still sell some Carena branded photo products. A lot of these later house-brand cameras were produced by Cosina, but also by Balda, Franka, Fuji, Mamiya, Taron, and Yashica.

By 1996, the Porst chain of camera stores was Germany's largest photographic retailer, and in that year it was purchased by a Belgian investment group. In 2001, ownership was transferred to Pixelnet. The following year, the company became insolvent and the rights to the name Porst were sold to the German group Ringfoto.