This paper discusses the goals and results of the research project Perseus-a as an attempt to improve information retrieval of digital images by automatically connecting them with text-based descriptions. The development uses the image collection of prometheus, the distributed digital image archive for research and studies, the articles of the digitized Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, art historical terminological resources and classification data, and an open source system for linguistic and statistic automatic indexing called lingo.