The photo archive contains about 100,000 photographs. Its chief contents are the photographic records of the department's own excavation projects. The image archive began with the department's Uruk-Warka archive established and developed since 1912 by the former Baghdad Department. This comprised about 30,000 black-and-white negatives and 35 mm slides, as well as pictures from excursions by the former department's numerous employees before its merger with the Damascus and Sana'a departments and the creation of the Orient Department in 1998.

Since 1998, the photo collection has been concentrating on the documentation of the department's own excavation projects, and it is expanding continually under the supervision of its staff and with the support from independent photographers. Digital formats are given preference since 2000. State-of-the-art  technologies have led to the emergence of ever new recording methods in support of the scientific work.  An equally important concern is to provide a stock of images adequately adapted for presenting scholarly work and communicating the cultural backgrounds of our host countries.

The management of this large amount of images has become possible through a digital archiving system that been tailor-cut to meet with the requirements of the department and hence provide staff with speedy internal access to the image data set. As a result, most of the archiving work is thus already done in the field. Thematic indexing of the image holdings through attributing descriptors for the refinement of targeted image searches takes place in Berlin at a later stage. In addition to the archiving of new image material, the old stock is continuously being digitised and included to the database, whilst conservation measures are also taken care of.

Over the years, the photo archive has been managed consistently by professional photographers who accompany the department's projects both scientifically and on a day-to-day basis.

The archive data of the photo archive are currently being systematically indexed for iDAI.world and are planned to be released for internal research.