The act of photography is to capture the moment so that it can be remembered for many years afterwards. While it is vitally important to catalogue and index images, even your own, things can sometimes go a bit pear-shaped in the storing process.

That is exactly what happened when European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) stumbled upon some science and engineering photographs that were taken between 1955 and 1985. The company, which is probably most famous for the Hadron Collider, started to digitise its collection of images, but realised that some of the have no information attached to them.

Rather than just storing them in a vault, to be lost to history and dust, it decided to turn to the public for help in trying to identify who the scientists in the images are, or even what they are doing.

“Many albums are still in need of titles, the names of the people in the photos, descriptions of equipment, etc., and we believe that much of this information could be crowd-sourced from the CERN community,” CERN said in a blog post.

While many photos have descriptions and dates associated to them, the mystery images was almost nothing that could identify what the subjects are doing. If you think you (or someone you know) could identify the images and place them in a date range, you can email CERN with suggestions.

“We will be offering many more challenges in future issues of the Bulletin. Thank you in advance for helping to complete the records,” it said.

To have a look at the mystery image or to just browse CERN’s photo archive, click here.