Mr Harvey and a team of volunteers plan to photograph every grave, headstone and plaque in Dunedin's Southern Cemetery.
Exactly how many photographs that will entail, Mr Harvey, of the Historic Cemeteries Conservation Trust, is not quite sure.
But with 4000 graves, most of which have headstones and plaques, and up to five or six photographs required per grave, the task was expected to take at least six months to complete, he said.
The cemetery, Dunedin's second, was opened in 1857 and is the resting place of many of the city's earliest settlers.
The images would be carefully matched to cemetery plot records and uploaded to the Dunedin City Council website, where they could be viewed through the "cemeteries search" link, Mr Harvey said.
"It is an ambitious project, but it will become a wonderful resource for genealogists all around the world," he said.
Preparation for the project began several weeks ago, with a Task Force Green worker employed to wash the headstones and plaques.
The photographers, including a group of students from Aoraki Polytechnic, began their work yesterday.
The project was a first for Dunedin but had been done in other places in New Zealand and overseas, Mr Harvey said.
However, unlike the images available on some other databases, he said he was determined the Dunedin images would be top quality.
"If a headstone is on a database, you need to be able to read the information on it clearly, and be able to zoom in for greater detail."
