If you’ve used Binded in the past couple days you may have noticed some changes. We’ve been hard at work over the past couple months trying to improve the site and fix the issues that our users have reported. Finally, after much anticipation, we’re excited to announce a few awesome features and fixes that we launched earlier this week.

Improved Upload Flow

Recently, a major source of issues has been our uploading flow. After launching support for submitting your work to the U.S. Copyright Office, we saw a huge increase in errors while uploading images. We pushed a quick fix to display a generic error message, but that seemed to do more harm than good. So we took to the drawing board and completely overhauled the design of our uploading flow.

Our new design further streamlines the process of uploading your images to Binded. Not only do we hope to decrease the amount of errors encountered while uploading images, we also added support for a few of the most requested integrations.

Many of our users already sync their libraries with a file-hosting service like Dropbox or Google Drive, or they have a large collection of work on social sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr. So in order to make it even easier to protect your work, we added support for uploading directly from these services.

To use these integrations, simply go to your Dashboard and click the ‘Upload’ button. When you see the modal appear, select the service you wish to import from, connect your account, then select the images you want to register.

New Applications Page

After reviewing the way our users were using the U.S. Copyright Office application feature, we decided it was best to move that out of the upload flow and into it’s own page. By doing this we also tackled another frequently requested feature, support for submitting existing registrations to the Copyright Office.

In addition to making this feature more useful, we’ve gone ahead and added an overview of all your previous applications. If you head to the Applications page, you’ll see a list of your applications with some additional information about them. We plan to use this in the future to make the application process more transparent and eventually provide more value once your applications are approved.

Other updates and fixes

You also might have noticed our new landing pages that were designed by the wonderful Caleb Lai. They’re a vast improvement over our previous designs and we hope they’ll convince even more people that Binded is the best way to protect your work in the digital age.

Last but not least, in the most recent update we added support for notifications. While we’re not using this feature too heavily at the moment, once we launch our new monitoring features in the coming months, notifications will be extremely useful for alerting you in real-time of potential infringements. Since, as any creative knows, when dealing with infringement, time is money.

What’s Next?

While we’re excited about these updates, we know there’s still much more to be done. Over the coming weeks we’ll be working on providing ways for you to take action once you have a match. We also have a few improvements to make on the applications page to give you more control while submitting your work to the government and insight into the progress of your applications.

If you have any questions or feedback please don’t hesitate reach out on Twitter or shoot an email to info@binded.com.

Thanks to everyone for your continued support. We’re well on our way to revolutionizing copyright and giving creators all the tools they need to protect their work.

Product Update — October 11, 2017 was originally published in Binded on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hard to believe that it has already been a month since we launched Binded and made it to the front page of Product Hunt. We have been overwhelmed by the positive feedback we’ve been getting, but we are far from done. Over the past couple weeks, we’ve been working hard on improving the site.

We built out a few new features and fixed various bugs we discovered after launch. There are so many things we wanted to work on, but given our limited resources we focused on the most pressing features. Let’s take a look at all the new changes.

Sorting

The biggest change comes to the Vault, where you can now sort by name, newest, and oldest. To use sorting, go to your Vault after logging in. Right above the grid of images, you will see a Sort by menu. Click on the arrow to show the dropdown menu listing the different sorting options.

One of our main goals for Binded is helping you manage large collections of copyright claims. On our old platform, once you had more than a handful of images, keeping track of them became nearly impossible. Our first solution to this problem was adding folders. While that was a step in the right direction, we knew there was more to do. Now you can sort the contents of a folder, making it easier to find the images you’re looking for.

Speed Improvements

These changes are less obvious, but you might notice that the site loads much quicker and feels more responsive. With these updates, pages will load nearly 2.6x faster.

Small Design Tweaks

At Binded, design drives our product decisions, and user feedback plays a vital role in that process. Every week we conduct user interviews, which often uncover design flaws we had overlooked. We have also been getting quite a few emails from users with insightful questions and feedback. So we added a support link to encourage more users to reach out. You can easily contact us by clicking Support in the bottom of the side bar menu.

We recently decided that making a style guide would improve our future designs and make the site more consistent. So we set out to collect all the components used across the site, and put them in one place.

After putting together the style guide and talking with some users, we made a few minor tweaks to the design across the site. For example, we increased the contrast for buttons inside your Vault, making them more accessible and apparent. There were also a few places where icons were the wrong size, or some buttons weren’t aligned properly.

Upcoming

Over the next few weeks, we plan to release more improvements for the Vault, including selecting/moving multiple copyrights at once. Many user’s have asked about registering with the U.S. Copyright Office, and we’re currently exploring ways to automate that process. Monitoring will see some major updates in the near future as well.

Building the world’s first copyright platform is no small task, and in case you haven’t heard, we’re hiring! We’re incredibly excited about the future of copyright and we aren’t stopping any time soon.

Thanks for taking the time to read through our updates. If you have any feedback or suggestions shoot us an email at info@binded.com.

What’s new with Binded? was originally published in Binded on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.