Tagbox.io - A “Google Photos” for business

The marketing world is becoming ever more visual. Instagram and then TikTok require marketers to create and publish images and videos on a regular basis; Canva made it easier than ever to edit those visuals; and image generators such as “DALL-E 2” are threatening to make visual content creation as easy as writing a couple of words into their input line.

We know that for personal use, Google Photos (or iCloud, if you’re an Apple fiend) has revolutionized media organization, and enabled you to make some sense of those thousands of photos you took in the gym bathroom (not you, of course, you’d never do that).

But what about that ever-growing pile of photos, videos, and other design materials you're using for work? Chances are, those are still locked in some sort of drive, scattered across dozens of folders, never to be seen again. Isn’t there a solution?

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Wait, why not use Google Photos?

As mentioned, Google Photos is an absolutely brilliant piece of software. Being able to search freely across our images, group them by people, and share albums with friends, has made all of our lives easier. So why not just use it for your business needs? 

First, you need a business-specific way of organizing your media, things that even the smartest AI in the world wouldn’t know - organizing by client or by project, filtering by photographer or location. 

You need to make sure that when you search for “low-cut dresses” - all of your low-cut dresses will appear, and not something that Google’s AI thought is probably a lot-cut dress.

Not convinced? How about specific sharing permissions? After all, would you really want that freelancer you worked with once to have direct access to all your photos? No, what you want is to be able to share specific albums with specific people, and be able to determine (and easily track) who can view images, and who can add content and make changes to its metadata.

There are many other reasons why most businesses won’t use photos professionally (sharing editable files, searching within shared albums), but those alone should be enough to sway you away from using Photos as your team’s media library.

Isn’t it just Google Drive / Dropbox?

Well, you might say - isn’t Google Drive (or Dropbox, or any other file storage) designed to handle those business use cases?

Well, it is, just not for the media. Hell, Google Drive doesn’t even have image search capabilities. Let me repeat that again, slowly - *Google*, the maker of Google Images, did not include image search within its core business storage solution.

But even if they had, think of all of the ways you’re using the Photos app - would that work if everything was sorted into folders? 

Or think of your favorite stock image website - Getty Images, iStock, Unsplash - how would you feel if you went into their website, and instead of search and filtering abilities, you’d find their millions of images organized in folders? That would suck, and you would close the tab within a millisecond. So why are you still organizing your most important visuals like that?

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Notion / Airtable?

If you’re using Notion or Airtable - you’re on the right track. Many companies are shying away from drive and utilizing those new galleries to share visuals. 

While definitely better than Drive, the issue with those solutions is that they are tediously manual. With no image/video search and zero auto-tagging, the project will be over by the time you organize your thousands of images.

However, if you’re only working with a few dozens of files - they’re definitely a great option.

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What would Coca-Cola do?

While you’re struggling to organize your 10k media files, just think - what do huge companies like Coca-Cola or Walmart do to organize their literally millions of assets?

Well, it turns out that these companies either build an in-house solution, or use what’s called “Digital Asset management” solutions. These solutions offer a lot of what we discussed above - image search, manual tagging, and custom permissions - everything you need to organize your media.

But as you might have guessed, what works for Walmart doesn’t really work for your 20-person marketing team. While great, these solutions are complex Enterprise solutions, which require long 6-month implementation processes, and very high costs, and at least one dedicated team member to manage them. Not very “Google Photosy”, isn’t it?

Tagbox.io - the best of all worlds?

What’s really missing is something in-between - something that’s as easy to use as Google Photos and Google Drive, but offers those more advanced business capabilities.

Here’s where Tagbox.io comes in. It helps you organize your thousands of photos and video, with full images search, including text-in-image and video transcription search. It’s the perfect combination of AI-based automation with the ability to manually create tags and filters for your business-specific needs, share your assets by permission with your team and external collaborators, and more.

And the best thing? You can start right away, with no pushy sales people egging you on, and without paying outrageous prices for what should really be a basic commodity for marketing teams.

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Want to give it a try? Sign up for a free account at tagbox.io.

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