This paper  proposes a critical reflection on documental and technological challenges regarding conservation, digitization, cataloguing and web dissemination of images in the experience of the Arquigrafia multidisciplinary project (www.arquigrafia.org.br). Arquigrafia is a collaborative web image sharing environment open to photographic institutional archives and users' private collections. The need to organize and share this information set, as well as the specificities of descriptive and thematic representation for effective retrieval of this digital heritage are also presented. Besides the issues issues related to the financing of digitization projects of collections and the preservation of documents and digital files, this article discuss the need to establish a public policy that incorporates the latest standards and the most appropriate methodology for the treatment, organization and retrieval information concerning the digital heritage that has been produced by Brazilian public institutions such as university libraries, archives and museums.