Gado Images is an AI-driven social enterprise digitizing, capturing and sharing the world’s visual history.
We pair human-in-the-loop AI with more than fifteen years of archival expertise to preserve visual collections, document the present, and bring both to a global audience.
Archives, editorial photography and content strategy — under one roof.
Manage and Monetize Your Visual Collections
From unprocessed estates to born-digital work and institutional archives, we digitize, research, restore, caption and distribute visual collections for photographers, collectors, newspapers and major research universities — generating licensing revenue for non-profits and heritage organizations.
How it works
Contemporary Editorial Coverage
Our photographers cover business, finance and technology every month, with a focus on emerging tech, AI and Silicon Valley. New work is captioned to editorial standards and licensed worldwide through Getty Images and other leading marketplaces.
Where it runs
Content & GEO Consulting
Turn your photos, video, articles and expertise into content that reaches people — and gets found and cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. We offer Generative Engine Optimization audits, strategy and hands-on content production.
Start a conversationA global audience of billions.
Our photos and footage routinely appear in leading publications, as well as in textbooks, television programs and documentary films. Collectively, our images have been seen billions of times by audiences on every continent.
Distributed through Getty Images, Alamy, Universal Images Group and other world-leading marketplaces.
We meet collections at any stage.
Whether you have boxes of negatives in a garage or a fully digitized institutional archive, we handle every step between the shoebox and the license.
Digitize
Careful, high-resolution scanning of prints, negatives, slides and documents.
Research
Archivists and historians establish dates, places and the people in the frame.
Restore
Image editing and restoration that respects the original artifact.
Annotate
Modern vision-language AI drafts captions and metadata; expert editors review every one.
Distribute
Placement with the marketplaces editors, publishers and filmmakers already use.
Monetize
Ongoing licensing revenue — and new audiences for work that deserves to be seen.
With you for the long term
Independent and free of venture capital, our social-enterprise model lets us build partnerships that last a decade or more — and prioritize preservation and access for historically important collections.
Innovative technology, the best people
Our own captioning and metadata pipelines combine today’s leading AI models with a team of archivists, translators, historians and veteran media professionals.
Partners and collections from around the world.
We work with institutions and photographers worldwide, and maintain our own wholly owned historical archive in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Afro American Newspapers
One of the finest Black history photo collections in the world.
Johns Hopkins University
Sheridan Libraries, including the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection.
Duke University
Rubenstein Library, including early photographs of China.
Clarence Gatson Collection
San Francisco entertainment and fashion photojournalism, 1975–1992.
Elizabeth Morse Collection
Kodachrome travel photography from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection
Women’s suffrage in the U.S. and abroad.
Stuart Lutz Collection
Rare Vietnam War photographs and ephemera.
Visualizing the Valley
Contemporary and archival imagery of Silicon Valley.
The Smith Collection
Our own archive: California history, women in history and the natural sciences.
Gado Images was featured in The New York Times for our work with human-in-the-loop artificial intelligence and our mission of digitizing historically significant photo archives.
Let’s bring your images to the world.
Have a collection to preserve, coverage to license, or content that needs to be found? Get in touch and we’ll get back to you.