Fast forward to 2012. It’s an afternoon like any other, and Atlanta photographer Tim Moxley is checking out the #atlanta hashtag on Instagram.

“A lot of it was just selfies and other crap,” he recalls, “but I came across a grid of images that seemed like they told a little story about the city. And I thought it would be cool to do a gallery show about Atlanta by people on Instagram and make it a charitable event.”

So Tim went through his Instagram feed and searched for other Atlanta Instagramers and freelance photographers whose work he appreciated. He reached out to two of them, Aaron Coury and Keith Weaver. They met at a coffee shop and hatched an idea. They would begin tagging photographs of the city with #weloveatl, and they encouraged others to do the same. They hoped to print and assemble the photos they gathered into a gallery show whose proceeds would benefit the Atlanta Community Food Bank.

“We expected 30 or 40 pictures,” says Coury, “but within 30 days, we had 5,000 photos.”

With the help of a fourth partner, Brandon Barr, an executive producer at Atlanta video production company School of Humans, they narrowed the vast collection down to 275 photographs, had prints made and partnered with the Youngblood Gallery in Atlanta’s Poncey-Highland neighborhood.

The show’s opening night in December of 2012 drew more than 1,000 people, and it raised $3,271.56 for the Atlanta Community Food Bank. The show also broke down the standard social barriers that keep Atlantans apart.

“The people submitting were not just in-town hipsters. It was everybody,” Moxley says. “Preparing for the first gallery show, we were going through the photographs, and we knew nothing about the people. We were just looking at usernames and email addresses, just trying to get the files so we could get the printing done. But opening night was just amazing. There was a woman who came in with her son and her mother — a middle-aged black lady who lived outside the perimeter somewhere. She came in and had her mom take her photo next to her photo that was on the wall. I went over and talked to them. They were super sweet, and she was super excited about having her photo up in a gallery. I was just totally charged.”