Various embodiments of a system and methods for real-time image collection and sharing are described. A group of geographically co-located mobile device users may capture images on the mobile devices during a session. The devices may send the images, during the same session, to a database where the images may be stored as a real-time image collection. The image collection may be shared, during the same session, among the mobile device users. The users may receive notification of new images in the image collection based on user preferences. The users may request, from the image collection, images containing particular content by identifying the content on an image and sending a search request which includes the identified content. A computation server may maintain a data set which associates similar images in the image collection. The data set may be updated for each new image that is added to the image collection.