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Another research database from the Rheinish Image Archive has been added to the site in the past few days.
With 5.16 million photographs, the Rheinish Image Archive, founded in 1926, ranks among the largest public art-historical image archives in Germany. This collection includes the estate of photographer Heinrich Pieroth, who was born in Mayen in the Eifel region in 1893. For more than five decades, he ran a photography studio in his hometown and dedicated his entire photographic oeuvre to the Vulkaneifel. From 1920 through the 1950s, he explored the cultural landscape and its buildings with his camera. He found his subjects in the villages, as well as in the fields and quarries: people going about their daily work and enjoying their cultural pastimes. Pieroth’s photographs are visual records of life in the Vulkaneifel during the last century.
“Rhenish Image Archive – Heinrich Pieroth Collection”
As of yesterday, the image archive has surpassed another million-mark milestone. With the integration of an additional image database, we now offer you over 4 million records for your research. The Harvard Art Museums, which include the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler museums in Cambridge, USA, offer a wide range of artworks from various eras and regions through their online collections. Examples from the 227,996 records …
…searching for “birthday”…
Have fun browsing!
If you have a personal account with prometheus, you can edit your profile and set your personal preferences by clicking on your name. How do you prefer to work in the image archive? Would you like to start with the basic search or the advanced search? Do you prefer the gallery view or the list view? Do you prefer to view 20 or 100 records per page? Which sorting option do you prefer—by title, artist, or another criterion?
Changing the settings alters the display of the search results.
Of course, you can always change these custom settings directly without having to modify the default settings each time.
prometheus offers two different search options. With the simple search you can quickly and easily search for your search terms across all fields. The advanced search allows you to search specific fields such as artist and title. In addition, there are various options in both searches for searching for images more specifically. If you search across all fields using the simple search, you can further refine your search using the search syntax. Use wildcards to find images for imprecise terms. These wildcards include * (*wurm), ? (pi?asso), and ~ (Gaugun~).
The advanced search allows you to combine different fields. For example, you can search for artist and genre:
A link is created here using the Boolean operators “and” and “or”:
Why not give it a try with “and not”.
Previously, your favorites were on the left side, but now you can select your favorites in the top bar next to Search, Image Collections, and My Uploads:
As before, you can add individual images or entire image collections to your favorites. The selection process is easier: simply click on the corresponding icon in the respective data record …
… or click on it again to remove the record from your favorites overview.
Until now it wasn’t possible to select multiple images in one of your image collections to then delete all of them in one step.
It is possible now. Click on the three dots and you can choose between “Add records to collection” and “Remove records from collection”.
This only applies to your own image collections or to image collections you were invited to for collaboration. Public collections, either readable or writable, are excluded.
Every week, our homepage changes the top image bar and gives a first visual impression of the image series of the week, with which we want to show you the range that prometheus has to offer. They are accessible to everyone. The themes are mostly inspired by current exhibitions, for example this week by the “Gregory Crewdson. Retrospective” at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. We either take something from the artist’s work, such as this week’s photo series “Beneath the Roses” by American photographer Gregory Crewdson, or an aspect of the exhibition, such as last week’s “Faces in Art. Medium of Expression, Self-Portrayal, Communication”. We look at what material is available in the image archive and create a public image collection in the image archive that is available to anyone with access to prometheus. There, you will find additional images related to the topic.
In our weekly series of images, we limit ourselves to eight works in the form of thumbnails. You can click on these to view the corresponding data record in the image archive.
As every year, in our first newsletter of the year we’re exploring your search terms in the image archive this time as well. Which artists have you searched for most often? Here are your top 20:
1. Caspar David Friedrich
2. Pablo Picasso
3. Vincent van Gogh
4. Salvador Dalí
5. Cindy Sherman
6. Hannah Höch
7. Gabriele Münter
8. Kurt Schwitters
9. Daumier
10. Frida Kahlo
11. Paul Klee
12. Wolfgang Tillmans
13. Caravaggio
14. Claude Monet
15. Paula Modersohn-Becker
16. Edward Hopper
17. Gerhard Richter
18. Rebecca Horn
19. Artemisia Gentileschi
20. Andy Warhol
There’s a new order at the top. Last year Andy Warhol was number 1. This time he just barely made it into the top 20. Caspar David Friedrich has moved up from second to first place and Pablo Picasso from 3rd to 2nd. New this year are Kurt Schwitters, Daumier, Paul Klee, Wolfgang Tilmans, Claude Monet, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Edward Hopper and Rebecca Horn, and no longer included are Giotto, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Albrecht Dürer and Roy Lichtenstein.
Other 2025 rankings of artists do not reflect the search behavior of a group. Instead, they employ different criteria and evaluations. The “Art Compass” (ger. “Kunstkompass”) is compiled annually by journalist Linde Rohr-Bongard and published in a magazine called “Capital”. Its evaluation and point system considers factors such as exhibitions of more than 300 museums, reviews in specialist journals, acquisitions by leading museums, and awards. This ranking continues to top Gerhard Richter as the world’s most important artist.
Of the currently 51,085 image collections in prometheus, 1,793 image collections are public. This means that they can be seen by everyone who has access to the image archive and, in some cases, can also be edited if the owners of these image collections have activated the “writable” setting. Select “public” and they will be displayed to you, here sorted by “updated on”:
Other sorting options are owner and title.
Now 1,793 image collections are already quite a lot, which are not easy to search from front to back in 10, 20, 40 or 100 packages to see if there is something interesting for you. Therefore, you can also search by different categories, such titles as “Maria” (18 hits), by description such as “Maria” (2 hits) or by keywords like the German word for Christmas,“Weihnachten” (16 hits).
By the way, if you click on one of the keywords that has been assigned to an image collection, you will be shown all image collections that have been tagged with this term.
You know prometheus combines a large number of different databases under one interface, don’t you? By default, your search term will be searched in all image databases (green dot).
In the advanced search, you can also choose whether you want to search institute, museum or research databases, the upload databases of prometheus users, in combinations or only include individual image databases.
At the suggestion of your ranks, we have now integrated a new feature. You can save your special selection of image databases and select it in your subsequent sessions or set it as your default, you can rename or delete the selection again.
