An overview of our research group’s experimental and theoretical developments is provided on the linear and nonlinear optical effects of white light since 2003. Their work includes the experimental researches on the white light one-dimensional photovoltaic dark spatial solitons and the waveguides and directional couplers induced by them, the circular and elliptic white-light dark spatial solitons and the white-light photorefractive phase masks, two-dimensional white-light photonic lattices and the applications of the white-light dark spatial solitons in the digital image transmission field, the interaction between the two-dimensional white-light dark spatial solitons to enhance or to improve the correlated degree of the white light through the interaction between the white-light beam and coherent dark spatial solitons, the interaction between the one- or two-dimensional white-light dark spatial solitons and the two-dimensional white-light photonic lattices, respectively. We also numerically simulate the interaction between two or more partially incoherent bright spatial solitons and the white bright spatial soliton pairs in the saturated logarithmic nonlinear medium. We have observed experimentally for the first time, the modulation instability of the coherent light and white light, respectively, in self-defocusing medium and so on.