The image of the city is an important object of urban research, since ideas about the city are involved in the formation of the city's identity, and also reflect its attractiveness to residents. Images are cognitive and emotional casts of the time of their formation, which are consistent with the existing social construct. One of the sources of obtaining information about city images can be considered tourist albums and guides, which mainly present image of the city. In order to trace the dynamics of development and the content of the images of Chisinau, formed both in the Soviet period and in the years of independence of the Republic, we selected several sources from each of the two periods and compared them according to the selected categories. The results demonstrated the compliance of the images from the albums with the main ideological trends of the time of their creation, starting with the concept of the “new” city in the Soviet period, the heyday of this idea in the 80s and the transformation of the image of the city in the years of independence - the search for identity, revision of history, the concept of a European city, the revival of traditional culture as one of the key components of national identity, which determines, among other things, the appearance of the city.