Descriptions contain all elements that may be depicted in an image: subjects, objects, clothing, animals, plants, actions and (historical) locations. REALonline also records the status, occupation or age of depicted persons or figures, their gender and their gestures or posture. For objects, clothing, animals and plants, REALonline records the colour, material (if recognisable) and shape. You can refine your search for all these criteria using the description facet (see also ‘How do the facets in REALonline work?’). You can also use the thesaurus facet to browse a tree structure of these fields for a ‘browsing’ search of the description data.

Descriptions in REALonline are recorded using a predefined structure and controlled vocabulary. They therefore differ from what is commonly understood as image description in many places.The sequence of image elements in the structured descriptions generally follows the criterion: from left to right, from top to bottom in the image – whereby the main motifs/protagonists are listed first and the background elements are listed in a second pass.