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.
• Metadata Handling: Uploaded files are cleaned of embedded EXIF data. Location coordinates, capture dates, and (when a collection enables it) compass direction are extracted and stored separately to power maps, timelines, and directional views. When direction is retained, the device make and model may also be kept so the system can correctly orient photos taken on different phones.

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.