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Abstract A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. And yet – or precisely because of this – it has been marginalized in European intellectual history or branded as misleading and unreliable. In the Digital Humanities, too, there has been a delay in devoting attention to the image, which is itself reflected in its constitution at German universities. The article deals with the technical characteristics of the digital image, its fundamental peculiarities as an entity of pixel sets with different resolutions and raster graphics as opposed to vector graphics. This is followed by considerations on the structure of image databases and their elementary properties as well as the description of complex search options across astronomically large amounts of image data, which are also becoming increasingly semantically accurate as part of the development of multimodal large language/image/audio models. The presentation concludes with some cursory considerations on AI-controlled image generators.

Keywords Digital Image, Image Databases, Digital Image Analysis