About TapeSave
TapeSave is a small, family-funded software team in Louisiana. We built TapeSave after digitizing our own VHS, 8mm, and Hi8 tapes and discovering that the part everyone talks about — the tape transfer — is the easy part. The hard part is what happens next: hours of fast-forwarding through one giant file per tape, trying to remember when a recital happened, whether that backyard birthday was 1989 or 1991, and which scenes are worth keeping.
Almost every family we've talked to has the same experience: they spend hundreds of dollars on Legacybox, Costco, iMemories, or a local shop, get a USB drive back, plug it in once, look at the giant unorganized files, and put it in a drawer. The tapes got digitized. The memories didn't actually get saved.
Who built this
TapeSave is built and run by Phillip Smith, MD — a practicing cardiology physician in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a long-time software builder. Phillip writes the code, answers the support email at [email protected], and runs every single tape through the pipeline before shipping any change. The medical background isn't irrelevant: a lot of TapeSave's users are grown children digitizing tapes that belonged to a parent who has died or who is losing memory. The product is built to be gentle with that.
You can find Phillip's writing on Quora (home-video preservation answers) and as a quoted source on Qwoted.
How TapeSave actually works
You upload a digitized file — from any service or any DIY capture — and our pipeline does four things:
- Scene detection. An AI vision model walks the video frame-by-frame to find the real cuts between recordings — birthday to vacation, recital to backyard.
- Date recovery. Most camcorders burned the date into a corner of the frame. We OCR those timestamps and stamp each clip with its true recording date, so clips land in the correct year in any cloud photo library.
- Dead-space removal. Static, blue screens, long stretches of an empty room — gone.
- Plain-English labels.Each clip gets a short description (“Outdoor birthday party with children”, “School recital with audience”) so you can scan a list instead of scrubbing video.
How we handle your files
- Files are encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest on Cloudflare R2.
- Uploads are automatically deleted 30 days after processing. We do not keep your family videos.
- We never use your videos to train any model — yours or anyone else's.
- Payments are handled by Stripe; we never see card numbers.
- We do not mail-in tapes and we do not handle physical media. Your originals stay with you.
How to reach us
Real humans, fast replies — usually within a day, often same-day.
- Email: [email protected] — anything billing, technical, or just a question
- Press & partnerships: [email protected]
- Or just upload a file and reply to the order email if anything looks off.
Ready to actually finish the job?
Upload one digitized file and get dated, labeled clips in minutes. $9.99 per tape. No subscription.
Start preserving — $9.99