FAQ
General
What is Tagcow's mission?
Who is Tagcow?
How did Tagcow begin?
What kind of service does Tagcow provide?
Who are Tagcow's customers?
Who are Tagcow's partners?
What is so valuable about searchable photos?
How does your company address privacy concerns?
How do I contact Tagcow if I am interested in business development opportunities?
If I have questions or feedback, how can I contact you?
Registration & Billing
What are prepayment tagging credits?
Do you offer price plans?
When I registered, I received 100 tagging credits. What are these for?
How do I cancel my account?
Process
How does automated tagging work?
How long will it take to tag my photos?
I have questions about the quality of tags I received?
Does Tagcow distinguish their tags from mine?
What information standard do you use tag my photos?
Do the tags remain with the photo when I download them?
Will your service tag photos I already have my Flickr account?
What photo formats do you support?
Is the quality of the photo altered during the tagging process?
If I manage my photo library on my local machine, can I still use your service?
Very simple...to make your photos yours again. What does that mean? Many people have thousands of digital photographs and yet their only method for searching on them is by the directory structure that they were downloaded into; probably by date, maybe by an event. If you're like us, we have spent countless hours searching through our photos to find just one photo that we want to send to a family member. We think that your photos should be as easy to find as it is to find the name of a website online. Wouldn't you like to be able to type into a search field "soccer" and find every picture you've ever taken of your daughter's playing days. We think so too!
Tagcow was founded by three people with similar views on photographs; that photographs are really the most valuable possession you own. You can lose any other physical possession and have it replaced but not your photographs. Photograph are like mental snapshots in time which are irreplaceable!
Now there's a story! After working on and releasing two other business models that dealt with the scanning and archiving personal photographs, a common problem always came up. We have all of these photographs in digital format but unless you have a photographic memory, you can never remember every photograph you've ever taken. So Matt started working on an idea he had and after a few short weeks; he had a Proof of Concept complete. And as they say, the rest is history.
What kind of service does Tagcow provide?
We provide a service to add descriptive and people tags (or meta data) to your photos "auto-magically." Most of us lead very busy lives and when it comes down to spending time with friends and family or tagging the thousand of photos on your computer, photo tagging probably loses out. Now you can get your photos tagged with real descriptive meta tags and not spend hours doing it yourself.
Our customers' are enthusiasts like us that have lots of photographs saved on sites like Flickrtm or SmugMugtm. However, just having your photos on a site is not really useful when you can't search on the content within that photo. Many of our users' have tried to add tags to their photos manually and quickly lose interest in keeping their tags up to date.
We currently only integrate with Flickr but we know that there are many other opportunities to expand our service. If you use a different service, please be patient. We are working hard to continually expand our service. In the meantime, please provide us your Feedback and let us know how we can improve.
What is so valuable about searchable photos?
This is one of our favorite questions. There are many services on the Internet today the provide you quick and easy access to public information: search engines, RSS feeds, web portals and the like. But what about finding something that is really valuable to you quickly, like your own personal photographs? Now you can quickly find that "needle in the haystack" photo because of descriptive or people tagging.
How does your company address privacy concerns?
We take privacy very seriously. Since we use Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Mechanical Turk to tag photos, your photos are temporarily viewable by those resources performing the photo tagging function. So, please do not upload media that contains sensitive or personally identifying information. See the Terms of Use for more information on acceptable media and our Privacy Policy for aditional privacy details.
How do I contact Tagcow if I am interested in business development opportunities?
Please refer to our Business Opportunities page for additional details.
If I have questions or feedback, how can I contact you?
Please use our feedback form if you have any questions concerning our service.
What are prepayment tagging credits?
Our prepayment model works like a gift card. You purchase a set amount of credits for the number of pictures you want tagged. The value of one credit is what's required to tag on photo. So, if you prepayed for 500 credits, you would be capable of having 500 photos tagged. We have several different payment plans to choose from. After logging into your account, just click on the "Buy Now" link at the top of the page or in your user stats section on the right side of the page.
Yes. We offer the following image tagging plans.250 images - $9.95
500 images - $19.95
1000 images - $39.95
2000 images - $69.95 (10% discount)
2500 images - $89.95 (10% discount)
When I registered, I received 100 tagging credits. What are these for?
We offer 100 free credits with each registration to use as a trial of our service. Then, if you like our service, you can buy more credits by clicking on the "Buy Now" link.
If you would like your account canceled, please send a cancellation request via our Feedback form. Please be sure to include your name and email address along with the request.
How does automated tagging work?
We can't tell you all our secrets but we can say that it is a combination of both computer and human technology. There have been numerous attempts to have computers do some sort of facial or other type of recognition. But let's face it, the technology is just not there yet. We incorporate the best of both "technologies" to solve a fill a very simple need: searchable personal photos. To see how the Tagcow tagging process works, view our Demo and How It Works pages.
How long will it take to tag my photos?
The time to complete an order obviously depends on number of photos submitted. However, we strive to complete each request within 24-48 hours of submission.
I have questions about the quality of tags I received?
We are constantly striving to provide the best quality tags for our customers. If you have used our service and have any questions concerning the tags you have received on your photos, please send us your questions or feedback so that we may improve our tagging process going forward.
Does Tagcow distinguish their tags from mine?
No. We do not add any tag or comment denoting that your photos were processed by Tagcow. Our process is non-destructive and does not destroy tags you may already have attached to the photo.
What information standard do you use tag my photos?
We use the IPTC and XMP info standards to embed the tags in the image files. Some desktop applications recognize these standards and some do not. Please check with your application vendor to determine compatability.
Do the tags remain with the photo when I download them?
Yes. When you download your photos from our site, we embed the photos with the tags.
Will your service tag photos I already have my Flickr account?
Yes. Once you have entered in your Flickr account credentials, our service will connect to Flickr, pull down the photos, submit them for tagging and post the tags to your images in Flickr. As long as you have the Flickr integration option selected, any new images posted to your Flickr account will be tagged. During the tagging process, your images in Flickr will still be available for viewing.
Note: We do not make any distinction between public or private photos within your Flickr account.
What photo formats do you support?
We currently support JPG and PNG images. We do not currently support RAW format due to size and bandwidth constraints.
Is the quality of the photo altered during the tagging process?
We maintain a full version (un-compressed) of all images that are uploaded to our service. Upon download, the full version is returned with the embedded tags.
If I manage my photo library on my local machine, can I still use your service?
We are currently in beta testing with our customer API, which will allow developers to create desktop integrations using our service. We currently don't have any desktop clients, but hope to have some options soon since this is a frequently requested feature. Please keep an eye on our blog for updates on new and upcoming features (http://blog.tagcow.com).