2023 year summary and a prologue to 2024

We officially launched Tagbox on January 12th, 2023, with the promise of building a "Google Photos for businesses": a simple-yet-powerful way for teams to manage their creative assets.

The idea seemed to spark some interest, helping us land the Product of the Week title. But the product itself was in its early stages. Over the past year we've worked closely with thousands of our users to improve the product month by month, and seeing the new and creative things you've been doing with it.

As the year draws to an end, I wanted to take a minute to zoom out, look at what we built together, and share some plans for 2024.

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Finding the right asset at the right time

This is by far the most important job we set out to do. How can a person easily find a photo or video within seconds from a pile of thousands, or even millions of photos.

With inspiration from both Google Photos and photo stock sites, we took the following approach:

Use AI to analyze everything that's IN the asset, and use smart tags to filter for all that important meta-data that the AI is blind to - the location where it was shot, the name of the photographer, the client it was taken for, and so much more.

We added dozens of automatic filters - from file type and resolution, through people's displayed emotions, to dominant colors and styles.

We then turned to make sure that our search is not only good - it's the best search in the world. We've added search support for illustrations, made it possible to search for emotions and shot types, and even made it cross-language, so that everyone around the globe can complete this basic task of finding the best image for a job.

Finally, we gave solutions to your specific creative flows - grouping similar photos together to make easy to pick the best one, or delete the worse of them.

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Sharing content with others

Professionals rarely work alone. To do business, you need to work with team members, clients, freelancers and agencies. Our users were jumping through hoops to share content, using various tools to select assets, and share them with others.

But like most things, these tools get messy at scale - duplicating content into folders, or sharing content via email or WeTransfer becomes impossible when you're always sharing content back and forth.

In comes collections - allowing you to instantly group content by tags or people in photos, and sharing with anyone. That link can be customized and shared publicly, as so many of you have done, creating online press kits, sharing photos from a party venue, or creating online educational libraries.

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People in photos

Finding people in photos create a unique challenge. A simple ask from a company CEO "please send me all my photos from yesterday's event" can take a long time, if you had thousands of photos taken. It becomes impossible if you need to share everyone's photos with them.

Face recognition simplifies that to a single click, making the impossible not only possible, but trivial. We first launched this in January, and kept improving and integrating it in other features based on your feedback. With the addition of face rec in video files - you can finally find everyone, anywhere.

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Working with video

Video poses a special challenge: unlike photos, it's not easy to skim through to find what you're looking for.

If you're working with influencers, for example, you might have 20 1-minute videos that have almost exactly the same thumbnail. In other cases, the part you're looking for might be in another scene that looks nothing like the first one. And if you simply don't remember who said something and when, you might find yourself watching hours of content, trying to find the part you're looking for.

Earlier this year, we added automatic transcript, which is fully searchable, making it easy to find the video you're looking for. Now, by adding face rec for video as well, we're closing the loop - just tell us who you're looking for and what they're talking about, and we'll find them for you.

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What's coming in 2024

While we're super proud of what Tagbox has grown to be, we have so much more planned for 2024. Here's a quick taste:

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More video. Way more video

Now that it's easy to find the right video, we have a new goal: getting you to the exact spot. We want you, for example, to be able to search for: "Gordon Ramsay yelling at a Chef while she's making fish" - and instantly get the exact scene where that happens.

This will allow you to effortlessly work with the overwhelming amounts of video content companies are now using - influencer videos, user-generated content, product tutorials, product showcase, and much, much more.

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Work at scale

today, it's pretty easy to upload a few files, tag them, create a collection, and share it. But what happens when you need to upload 10,000 new files, tag them all individually, create hundreds of unique collections, and share them with thousands of people?

Those are actual problems we faced time and time again, and we'll be looking to create the tools to allow you to easily achieve your goals, regardless of how ambitious they are.

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Constantly improving what's already there

If there's one thing we know about staying organized, it's that organization is not about always adding more.

Instead, it's about always making sure what you have is in exactly where it should be. It's about adjusting and getting rid of things you no longer need.

We want to help you do the same things, but faster, in more elegant ways, and for that - we need your help. If you encountered any flow that didn't feel right, that took too long, that you didn't feel comfortable doing, please let us know. Email us at at hello@tagbox.io, or leave a note on the feedback form from within the app.

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Managed to go through 2023 without trying Tagbox? Make your new year more organized by signing up here.