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Have you been traveling in recent months and want to access your own images alongside those from prometheus for your research work, homework, reports, and presentations? Then use your own image database. Anyone with personal access has one and can upload their own images directly and either just save them for now, save them to their favorites for quick access, or assign them to existing image collections.
For each of your uploads, you can specify whether you want to make the image available to everyone in prometheus after it has been reviewed by the prometheus office for quality assurance purposes. The images will then appear directly in the search results after a short time. If you only want to use it for private purposes, simply remove the preset check mark.
A favorites bar is available on the left side of the screen with your personal access. There you can store individual images and entire image collections (see 1.) and access them directly. Icons and headings show you what you have stored.
You can expand and collapse these favorites in the form of boxes (see 2. and 3.), change their order, and delete them. When you delete them, you are only deleting the link to this sidebar. The images and image collections remain in their original locations.
In future, you will no longer find your favorites on the left-hand side, but in the top bar next to the search function, image collections and your database:
If you click on the individual thumbnails in the current image series, you will be taken to prometheus, provided you have access via one of the three access points, to … a black screen. If you click on the black screen, you will be taken to the second zoom level of the “image” and you can watch a video, for example “Eric Lanz. La pâte, Der Teig, Ausschnitt, 2000, 1-channel video, loop, color”. In total, you will find around 1,200 videos by various artists in the research database “Video Archive, imai – inter media art institute, Düsseldorf”.
Another type of media you may encounter in the image archive is a GIF, such as “Ouroboros by Diana Domingues” in the research database “Archive of Digital Art”.
And “Kompakkt” from the Institute for Digital Humanities at the University of Cologne provides interactive 3D objects such as “Phaistos Disc”.
For several months now, we have been offering three different approaches to the image archive.
(1) If your PC is located within a network of the currently 168 licensed institutions, you can use the campus access. After you have read and confirmed the terms of use, you can use the simple and advanced search functions in the image archive.
(2) Or do you already have personal access, with a login name or e-mail address and password? Then you can use it to log in and use other functions in the image archive, such as creating image collections, creating your own image database or saving your preferred settings. If you don’t have one yet but want to use these functions, you can register to use the image archive free of charge if you belong to a licensed institution. For a one-week trial access, fill out a short form and after verification of your research interest, your account will be activated.
(3) Some of the licensed institutions now also offer eduGAIN access for you. And the number is growing. “education Global Authentication INfrastructure” is a global service that connects various national and regional identity networks in the research and higher education sector. It enables researchers and students to log in to various online services offered by other institutions or networks with a single login, without having to create separate accounts or log in to each service individually. You can currently log in via “single sign-on” if you belong to one of the following institutions:
Bibliothek PZ.BS, Basel
Fachhochschule Potsdam
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin
Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle, Zentralbibliothek
Universität Greifswald
Universität Paderborn
Universität zu Köln
Universitätsbibliothek Bern
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste
At its meeting at the beginning of July, the Joint Science Conference of the Federal Government and the Länder decided that all nine consortia from the first round for the development of the National Research Data Infrastructure will continue to receive funding. In October, NFDI4Culture will therefore continue. We are also very happy about this, because the University of Cologne is a co-applicant institution with the prometheus image archive and, together with the University of Paderborn, responsible for the department of tools and services.
Prospectively, we will occasionally open small drawers in our image archive for you – and give you some quick tips. In our rubric “Did you know …?” we will be presenting some charming details at irregular intervals that sometimes remain hidden.
- Did you know that you can select the databases to be searched for your search term in the Advanced Search?
The default setting in the advanced search is to search in all databases. However, you can choose to search only in institute, museum or research databases or in the upload databases of prometheus users …
… or should only be searched in sporadic image databases.
- Did you know you can change your e-mail address in your profile?
If you are logged in with your personal account, you will see your name at the top right. Click on the name, then on the pencil and you can enter a new e-mail address.
- Did you know you can sort the images in the image collections by title?
Images in image collections are sorted by default according to “insertion order”. You can choose nine other ways to display your images, for example by “Title”:
We have already announced it. The updated version of the image archive will soon be online. On our test server „next“ we have gradually implemented all functionalities with a new design over the last few weeks. The next image archive is optimized and modernized, at the same time recognizable, familiar, clear and understandable.
In the penultimate step, we are currently testing extensively on our development server. If you would like to have a look and try out how it feels, whether everything works as usual and what is new, and if you would like to give us feedback on your sessions, then you are welcome to send us an e-mail to newsletter[at]prometheus-bildarchiv.de and we will give you an account there.
Since 2021, an image similarity search has been integrated into prometheus, with which you can find similar images for an image within the image archive.
It was developed and integrated by Francisco Mondaca and Jörg Koch within Task Area 3 of the NFDI4Culture project. Based on the self-supervised learning algorithm SwAV (Swapping Assignments between Views), image vectors were created that are pre-calculated for all images in the image archive and stored in the index so that search engine queries are reduced to calculating the distance between these vectors stored in the index. Further image vectors are created at regular intervals for all new images in prometheus and stored in the index.
The results of the image similarity search can be found under the images in the image archive. Initially, four “Similar images” are displayed there. With one click you can directly “Show all”.
We occasionally receive inquiries from your community asking whether we can grant permission to publish one of the images in prometheus in a publication or on a publicly accessible website. We always have to decline these requests, as prometheus itself does not hold any image rights.
But we support you in obtaining these permissions.
First of all, we have general information on image rights and the use of images in prometheus published on our website. Then, directly next to the image (on the left), you will find a link (§) to the image rights of the selected image.
There you can click to access information on the image rights of the respective artwork (1.a.), of the respective photograph (1.b.), on the image credit (2.), and on the image database from which the work originates in the archive – including instructions on how, with whom, and where to clarify publication rights.
If the usage rights are, for example, held by VG Bild-Kunst, you will find the direct link in the field “Image Rights”.
If the paragraph symbol has an asterisk (§), then you can obtain the publication permission directly via a link, as in our example of “Evening Return” from the image database “bpk – Image Portal of Art Museums, Image Agency for Art, Culture and History, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin”. Indicate what kind of publication you intend to use the image for, fill out the form, and submit it.
In some cases, you do not need permission to publish images. Public domain works are no longer protected under copyright law. This also applies to works under the Creative Commons Zero license. In some cases, it is requested that when reproducing such images, the artist, title, date, and institution are mentioned in the caption – for example, for images from ‘The Art Institute of Chicago’.
… and for presentations in lectures, talks, or lesson preparation, as well as for use in research and teaching, you may freely use the images in the archive. For this purpose, we have concluded a contract with VG Bild-Kunst, which also permits the inclusion of the images in prometheus by the various image databases.
3,913,931 images and 44,344 ratings of images are the current figures in the image archive. So there are not that many image ratings. We are currently wondering what the reason for this might be.
Results from last year’s survey and from various seminars have given us brief indications that the rating of images with up to five stars may be known, but that we have not yet sufficiently communicated the advantages of image ratings for you in your searches and collections. So let’s start with that.
The rating scale ranges from one star for „unusable“ to three stars for „usable“ and five stars for „very good“. By awarding stars, you rate the quality of the images. Criteria include resolution, color fidelity, image detail and orientation as well as Moiré pattern. These ratings automatically influence the ranking when the relevant search results are displayed.
In addition, you can actively use the sorting options „by average ratings“ and „by number of ratings“, as in our example of the image collection „Image series 2025 / 18 – Animals in art“. In the first case, the images are sorted according to the average rating values, from 5.0 to 3.0, and in the second case according to the number of ratings, from 2 to 1.
Do you agree with the ratings given or do you see an image rated with three stars („usable“) differently?
You can also place more precise descriptions such as „mirror-inverted“ in the comment directly on the image. A search with this search term shows, for example, the images commented on in this way, because the comments are integrated directly into the search index.
However, you can also see the comments on the image without searching for them when the search results are displayed both in the gallery view and in the list view directly below the image. By clicking on „Comment“ you will then receive the additional information from the community directly. By optimizing retrieval in this way, you can benefit from the expertise of others and contribute your own knowledge.
