About Gather Media
Built by the non-profit Open Civic Systems, Gather Media is a dedicated platform for community-curated media collections. It provides a space for groups — like neighborhood associations, hiking clubs, or families — to collaboratively collect, organize, and present photos and videos around a shared theme.
What is Gather Media?
At its core, Gather Media is a structured, moderated media archive your community can build together.
- Capture-First: Designed to gather high-resolution media quickly and easily from a group, allowing you to review and organize it later.
- Frictionless Uploads: Anyone with a shared upload link can contribute high-quality photos directly from their phone browser without needing to create an account.
- Dynamic Visualizations: Automatically plots your group’s media on interactive maps and chronological timelines using extracted location and date data.
- Privacy-Minded Processing: Photo originals are replaced with web-friendly copies, removing their hidden metadata. Location, dates, and compass direction are saved only when the collection and the contributor allow it, to power maps, timelines, and directional views. See what happens to your files.
What happens to your files
When you upload a photo, we make web-friendly copies in a few sizes and then delete your original file.
- Why copies? Small versions load quickly on phones and in grids. Larger ones look sharp full-screen.
- Why delete the original? Photo files carry hidden details, like the device and software used and sometimes more. Deleting the original removes them for good, and we don’t store large files nobody needs.
- What we keep: the copies, the file’s name, and (only if the collection uses maps or timelines) when and where the photo was taken and which way the camera faced.
Your original photo isn’t stored here, so keep your own copy.
Videos and documents are different. We store them as you uploaded them, so hidden details inside them, like where a video was recorded or a document’s author, stay in the file. If that matters to you, remove them before uploading.
More detail is in Help: Files & Privacy and our Privacy Policy.
How is it different from Google Photos or Instagram?
Unlike Instagram, Gather Media is explicitly not a social media platform; there are no feeds, follower counts, or engagement metrics.
Compared to texting or Google Photos, Gather Media removes the friction and messiness of group sharing. Texting compresses high-resolution photos, and commercial cloud apps often force everyone to download a specific app or log into an ecosystem. Gather Media allows group leaders to generate a simple link that anyone can use to upload. Gather Media also provides moderation tools, allowing designated “Curators” to review, approve, or hide submitted media before it goes live to the broader group.
Collection Visibility
Gather Media gives you control over your collection’s audience through three settings: Draft (members-only while you build it), Unlisted (accessible only to those with a direct link), and Public (listed in our community directory).
Getting Started
We are currently onboarding a few communities to help us during our launch. You can sign up using your Google account or create a local account using your email address. Visit our Collections page to explore public collections or get started with your own.