The article studies the use of photo documents in various research practices as well as issues of involving more of these resources into research by optimizing the resource base planning. Photo documents are sources which can be used in many different research fields. They are sure to be in demand as far as multidisciplinary “visual” studies evolve. The current methodology of representing information about photo collections in state archives does not allow one to improve the quality of research material selection. The article aims at developing a photo documents database architecture satisfying different researchers. The research methodology includes the content analysis of published scientific materials that addressed the main research lines and goals determining researchers’ use of photo documents. The research novelty is the approach described. As a result, photo document attributes were designed. They include not only the year of creation, the author, the place and the thematic description, but information about the document originality, its belonging to a collection, related documents, the customer of a photo document, the function and the context of photo document creation, the type and the nature of a photo. Each group of thematic attributes can be further decomposed to form the tree database structure. The article demonstrates the decomposition of the attribute “photo nature - environment - urban environment” through several grounds proposed in current urban environment studies.