Help

Everything you need to know about organizing a collection, getting media in, and sharing it with your community.

Your Collection

A collection is your home base in Gather Media. Most settings are configured once when you create the collection and rarely need to change — but you can adjust anything at any time.

Visibility

Collections have three visibility states:

Draft — Only collection members can see it. Use this while you’re getting set up.
Unlisted — Publicly viewable, but not listed in the Gather Media directory. Anyone with the link can browse it.
Public — Listed in the Gather Media directory and open to everyone. Requires a public contact form to be configured.

Description

The description is what visitors see when they land on your collection page. Write something that tells people what the collection is about and who contributed to it.

Default Contributor Instructions

If you’re accepting uploads from the public or a large group, contributor instructions let you set context that appears on the upload page. Use this to tell contributors what kinds of photos you’re looking for, any framing or content guidelines, or just a thank-you note. These instructions load automatically on any collect link connected to your collection. When you create an individual collect link, you can override these instructions for that link specifically.

Membership

Members are people who have accounts on Gather Media and have joined your collection. Members can upload media linked to their own accounts, leave collection team comments, and — depending on their role — help with organizing and curation. See Collect Links for how to bring in contributors who don’t have an account.

Upload Link Defaults

Controls the default behavior for collect links generated from this collection — for example, how many hours a link stays active before expiring. Each collect link can override these defaults when it’s created.

Metadata Policies

Gather Media can extract GPS location and timestamp data from photos at the time of upload. This data powers the map and timeline views and makes your collection much richer over time.

Metadata collection is on by default — we think it’s worth it, and we encourage you to keep it enabled. Contributors can opt out on a per-upload basis if they choose. You can also configure these policies per collect link for more granular control.

Community Input

When enabled, visitors can submit feedback or flag specific media in your collection. You can review these through the Community Input item in the Manage menu. This is separate from Collection Team Comments, which are internal-only.

AI Naming

An advanced optional feature. When enabled, Gather Media can send a thumbnail and GPS coordinates for a photo to an AI to suggest a name or location label. Useful for large collections of location-tagged photos where manually naming everything isn’t practical. This is off by default and can be initiated in bulk through the Organize tool.

Public Contact Form

Adds a contact form to your collection’s public page so visitors can reach you — to ask about joining, contributing photos, or anything else. A public contact form is required for a collection to be set to Public visibility. If you’re running an unlisted collection, the contact form is optional but recommended.

Managing Your Collection

The Manage menu gives curators and administrators access to the tools for organizing content and running the collection.

Collect Links

Collect links are how you get media into your collection from people who don’t have a Gather Media account. You create a link, send it to contributors, and they can upload directly from their phone or computer — no account required. Collect links are configurable: you can set expiry times, file limits, and per-link contributor instructions that override the collection defaults.

Collect links have their own detailed help section — see Collect Links.

Organizing Content — Tags, Views, and Entries

These three tools are the core of content organization. Each lets you create a subset or grouping of your media for yourself and your visitors.

Tags — Labels you apply to individual photos or files. A photo can have multiple tags. Tags drive filtering in the Studio and power the map and timeline views in the Gallery.
Views — Saved filter presets. A view lets you define a combination of filters (tags, date range, etc.) and save it as a named link. Share a view to let visitors browse a specific slice of your collection.
Entries — A way to tell the story behind a subset of photos. An entry has a title, a date, linked photos, and a description where you can write a narrative around the media — more than just a label, a proper account of what happened. Think of it as a short article or journal entry built around the photos.

Collection Team Comments

An internal communication tool for collection members. Members can leave comments on individual photos — visible only to other members of the collection team, never to the public. Useful for curators coordinating on organization decisions or flagging something for follow-up.

Community Input

Where you review feedback and flags submitted by the public on individual photos. Incoming community input appears here for curator review.

Organize

A bulk-action tool for curators. Filter your media by collect link, media type, date range, or untagged status, then select multiple photos and apply tags, link them to an entry, or queue them for AI naming — all in one pass. Useful when you have a large batch of new imports to work through.

Members

Shows everyone who has joined your collection team. Administrators can change a member’s role or remove them from the collection. Members join on their own — either because the collection is publicly open or via a join code. Administrators cannot manually add members directly.

Getting Media In

There are two ways for media to come into your collection, and they work differently.

Member Uploads

Collection members with Gather Media accounts upload directly via the member upload link. Media uploaded this way is attributed to their account — their name is associated with those contributions.

After uploading, members can check the processing status of their files on the upload page. There’s a one-click button to import just their own files and mark them as approved in a single step. They can also skip that and let their files flow through the standard import and review process.

Collect Link Submissions

Anyone with a collect link can submit media without a Gather Media account. These contributions are anonymous.

Getting these files into your collection is a two-step process:

Import — Go to the Import screen and pull the files into Gather Media. At this stage you can also reject submissions outright — they won’t proceed to review.
Moderation — Go to the Moderation queue to review accepted imports. For each photo you can: Approve (make it visible in the collection), Flag (mark for follow-up), Hide (keep it out of public view), or Edit (update metadata before approving).

These are always two separate steps.

Viewing Your Collection

There are two distinct ways to view the content in your collection.

Studio

The Studio is the native Gather Media view — a grid of thumbnails showing your approved photos and media. You can filter by tags or views and click into any photo to see the full detail page.

On the detail page, members and curators can:

Add or edit tags
Post a collection team comment (visible only to other members)
Edit the photo’s metadata — title, description, location label, and other fields

The Studio is the primary working environment for curators and members. Visitors can also browse the Studio, but without editing or commenting access.

Gallery (the Visualizer)

The Gallery presents your collection through a rich, interactive multi-view explorer. It’s primarily designed for public audiences and is the best way to share your collection with people who want to explore it visually. It offers four views:

Explorer — A dual-paned window pairing a map with individual photos. As you move through photos chronologically, their locations appear on the map — letting visitors walk through the collection as a spatial journey.
Gallery — A visual grid optimized for browsing all approved photos at once.
Map — All photos plotted on a map by GPS location.
Timeline — Photos arranged in chronological order.

Dashboard

The Dashboard gives curators and administrators a quick view of the collection’s current state:

Pending actions — imports waiting to be reviewed, community input that needs attention
Collection statistics — total photos and files, approved vs. pending counts
Members — how many administrators, curators, and members your collection has
Storage — how much of your storage quota you’ve used
Recent activity — a log of recent changes and actions in the collection

Collect Links

Detailed section — coming soon.