The Vorarlberg State Library uses retro digitisation to facilitate long-term and user-friendly access to its image collections trough the institutional repository volare. As traditional resources and means are limited when it comes to processing large data volumes, new and innovative methods are being explored to generate high-quality descriptions and metadata in a more efficient way. The crowdsourcing platform sMapshot not only allows the georeferencing of digital image files to a geographical location but also the positioning of landscape images on a virtual 3D globe. This geoinformation enables the calculation of place names such as cities, districts or mountains. In the context of machine-based descriptions for historic photographs, the Vorarlberg State Library is also experimenting with machine vision.