Researchers coordinating investigations with thousands of incidents and dozens of team members still rely on spreadsheets to organize their work. But Google Sheets wasn’t built for eyewitness video. Spreadsheets can’t handle sprawling visual investigations. They’re not equipped to handle graphic content.
Atlos is purpose-built for visual investigations. It’s a catalog of incidents, built with collaboration, data integrity, and researcher safety top of mind. Atlos supports ambitious visual investigations around the world. Today, we power Bellingcat’s investigation into civilian harm in Ukraine. We’ve also been the home to research focused on Russian equipment losses in Marakiv and Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
Atlos is a collaborative workspace for visual verification, built on individual incidents.
Each incident has its own page with descriptive data and a collaborative feed.
When a researcher adds a new incident to the platform, we run a deconfliction search to make sure the media isn’t already in their catalog.
Attributes, like Date and Geolocation, make investigations easily searchable. Investigators can quickly customize attributes to suit a particular investigation.
Atlos logs every change to incidents’ data, providing a clear record of the investigative process. This feed also serves as a home for incident-level collaboration.
We noticed researchers didn’t have the vocabulary to easily discuss visual media.
So we assign each incident a unique identifier—like ATL-018G29—to help researchers refer to media on and off Atlos. .
The Atlos database is searchable by each attribute. Researchers—specifically organizational partners—can harness our catalog for reporting, investigation, and accountability efforts.
Atlos makes collaboration as easy as Google Docs. Just select a collaborator and decide whether they’ll be able to view, edit, or manage the incidents in your project.