The OEAI has over 10,000 historical lantern slides and almost 82,000 slides at its disposal in its slide and photograph archive. Every year, new material is added to this archive from current projects, including the medium of digital photography. In 2002, it was necessary to establish a digital image database not only for the administration of the images and their usage in research, teaching, publications and for publicity work, but also to ensure the protection of the resources.
Since the summer of 2006, the image material of the OEAI has been administered using the software EasyDB created by the company "programmfabrik" (based on the database management system MySQL). The foundation for this is a thesaurus, compiled at the Institute for Classical Archaeology of the University of Vienna, which provides the basis for a comprehensive and detailed key-word search of the image resources.
To date (as of March 2008), ca. 50,000 images have been entered into the database and linked to key words. In spring of 2007, the storage capacity of the data bank server was increased to a volume of 5 TB.