Our archive comprises around 250,000 photographs as well as extensive film and document holdings — a volume that no single person could catalogue entirely by hand. Rather than leaving this material inaccessible until every image has been catalogued manually, we take a different route: we use AI to give each image an initial, searchable description — based on the historical context we provide regarding origin, period and collection context.
How an image description is created — in three steps
- Initial AI image description: An image-analysis model first describes what is visible in the photograph — people, uniforms, equipment, vehicles, terrain, situation. This step captures the pure image content, without historical contextualisation.
- Enrichment with album metadata: Every album carries its own contextual information: provenance and collection context, unit, period, places and routes. We derive these details from original captions, accompanying documents and our own research — structured per album.
- Linking both layers: In the third step, the image content is interpreted in the context of its album. Where the sources allow, “soldiers at a gun” thus becomes a historically situated description with unit, region and period: the searchable historical image description including keywords.
The quality of each description therefore depends directly on the album’s sources: well-documented albums allow precise attributions, while sparsely captioned holdings remain more cautiously phrased.
What this means — and what it does not
These descriptions are a starting point for your research, not a definitive scholarly catalogue entry. They make the holdings searchable and provide an initial classification. However, they may contain errors: incorrect dating, confusion of places, units or people, imprecise attributions. We therefore label AI-assisted descriptions transparently and expressly do not guarantee historical accuracy.
We believe this is the right approach: accessibility with occasional errors is more valuable than a perfect but inaccessible collection. Historical primary sources only unfold their value when researchers, authors and interested readers can actually work with them.
Help out — and earn credits
Where our descriptions are wrong, we invite you to correct them. Every correction submitted is reviewed by us and, once confirmed, credited to your account. This creates a catalogue that becomes more accurate with every piece of feedback — a shared cataloguing project between us and you. As a primary source, each image remains unchanged; only its description is improved.
On citation
Please treat the descriptions as provisional in publications and verify key statements against the image itself. A recommended citation format for each image can be found on the respective image page.