Over the last seven years a multidisciplinary research team of the University of São Paulo (USP) with the support of São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP (2012/24409-2) has been dedicated to design a collaborative environment of architectural images on the Web. This collaborative environment denominated ARQUIGRAFIA allows that institutional users – such as GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), NGOs, Universities and Research Centers – receive the collaboration of private users – such as students, teachers, photographers and amateurs – to build an open, public and free digital iconographic database of Brazilian buildings and urban spaces. In the ARQUIGRAFIA project we has analyzed the digital repository and the website data bases; proceeding analytical-critical studies of the documentary languages used for the indexation of Brazilian architecture images and tags proposed by the users; raising problems for the metadata accordance between systems; as well as consolidating standards which respond both to international interoperability requirements and to local needs for organization and information access. On the website or on the Android App, users create an account and share their visual collections (photographs, drawings and videos) by indexing, georeferencing, licensing (Creative Commons) and uploading archives. Meanwhile, all users can organize albums, post comments and download high-resolution images with metadata. The institutional users can ask for an institutional login that allows them to have a collective identity online with a particular name and avatar. Those users can choose, whenever they log in, if they will log as a private user or part of an institutional team. Nowadays, the main images of ARQUIGRAFIA come from the collection of the library of School of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Sao Paulo (FAUUSP). It has stimulated the construction of an architectural visual culture, but in fact, the ARQUIGRAFIA plays the role of a pilot program for a template called +GRAFIA that can offer free help for other areas of knowledge to build their own visual collaborative environments. We can think about a BOTANYGRAFIA dedicated to the flora, or an ARTGRAFIA, dedicated to visual arts. Conceptual and technological challenges concerning the design and the operation of ARQUIGRAFIA allows us to characterize it as an online experimental laboratory and a case study on the opportunities and the risks of digital projects on humanities based on images constellations.