Many photographs in the collection are privately owned. As a consequence, the quality of the material in the collection varies greatly. As regards the inclusion of visual material in the archive, the Museum Maluku has a policy according to which the historical and emotional value prevail over the quality of the photograph. Of some historic events there is hardly any visual documentation available at all. For those cases, even vague photographs can be of great significance and are studied meticulously.

The Moluccan community's strong involvement with the MuMa collection is also due to the fact that an important part of the collection consists of family photographs and portraits.

Emotional value | The creation of the photo archive