Earlier this year, my colleague John Cook wrote about a Seattle startup called TagCow that tags photos on Flickr or a personal photo folder to make them more easily searchable.

The free consumer service has taken off, with more than a million images tagged. But the service didn't generate enough revenue, and founder Michael Droz is shifting focus to business customers.

After "tagging over a million images for free we looked at our balance sheet and realized it was make money or close up shop time," Droz said in an email. "It's at that moment that we realized we had to focus on the enterprise digital asset management market."

TagCow had its first profitable month in October and is signing up two new customers, Art.com and Autobytel, to tag their large image databases. Art.com is an online retailer of posters, prints and framed art. Autobytel operates MyRide.com, a new and used car information website.

TagCow still offers the consumer photo-tagging service, though it now charges for it, with price plans starting at $9.99 for 250 images. Droz said he plans to roll out "a new and improved consumer service" soon that will include some tagging for free — "think Picasa only way better."

The tagging will be done by humans as well as "some nifty image recognition software that we've got our hands on," according to Droz. TagCow uses Amazon Mechanical Turk for the human tagging.

TechCrunch, which helped generate some early buzz around TagCow, has more on the startup's evolving business model.

Here's John Cook's March post on the company.