Arrangement
The collection has two series: photographs and published indexes.
The photographs are organized by country with Germany preceding Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon. Within each country, the photographs are largely arranged alphabetically by city name. One exception is Arta, Greece, which is filed with the German cities. The country designations represent political boundaries before World War I, so a few locations in modern day France, Poland, and Russia are also filed with the German cities. The Library of Congress assigned the item numbers in a single sequence, starting with 1 through 732 for the photos and 733 through 737 for the published indexes. The original Messbildanstalt building or survey identification numbers were retained and labeled as "Index no."