- Moving Tasks (SDK): The SDK now supports direct Task Move between arbitrary workflow stages, bypassing the previous constraint of sequential stage progression. See the SDK documentation for method and example here.
- Long Audio Files: You can now pre-generate waveforms offline for audio files, eliminating long delays when opening large tasks. This means faster loading, and more efficient annotator time.
- User Invites: Users invited to your Org can now accept invitations from the Home screen of the Encord app.
- Removed Labels & Export Tab: In our on ongoing effort to simplify label export and version management, we removed the Labels & Export tab from Projects. Labels are now exported using the new export button, and label versions are saved in the Settings tab of your Project.
- Workflow Templates: Workflow template management is now in the Projects section of the Encord app.
- Numerical Ontology Type: We’ve introduced a new Classification and Attribute type to the Ontology: Numerical. This field accepts only numerical input.
- Pixel Measurements: We added a new setting that allows you to view the source pixel size in the interface, making it easier to estimate object dimensions before adding or adjusting labels. In addition, there’s an option to automatically include the pixel area of objects in their titles.
- Task Actions: All task actions have been unified into a single Actions menu. This new menu supports hotkey-driven workflows, which improves the user experience and the speed at which you can assign tasks, change priorities, and move tasks.
- View Mode: Admins and team managers can use the new view mode to access tasks from any Workflow stage. View mode prevents you from accidentally editing labels or grabbing tasks from your teammates, allowing you to audit team work and review progress without interrupting others. You can easily switch from view mode to edit mode at any time, allowing you to view labels without first initializing a task.
- Entity User Management: We’ve improved the user experience for managing users in Projects, Datasets, and Ontologies. This makes adding and removing users faster and provides a clearer overview of user roles for each entity.
- Label Export UI: A new Export button and simplified modal lets you export labels from any tab within a Project. This makes the exporting process faster and more convenient.
- Synchronized Group Playback: You can now synchronize playback for all videos and audio files within a Data Group, ensuring all media plays simultaneously and in sync when triggered.
- Simplified Group Timeline: A new setting allows you to display a single, consolidated timeline for the entire Data Group, showing only the annotations for the data unit currently being annotated or reviewed. This simplifies navigation for complex multi-file tasks.
- Email Updates: You can now subscribe to receive Organization Analytics email updates weekly or monthly, ensuring you stay informed with what happens in your Organization.
- Share the Organization Analytics You can now share a link to the Org Analytics directly with other Organization admins, streamlining collaboration and insight sharing.
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Data Groups (BETA): We’re excited to announce early access to Data Groups! This feature lets you organize individual files into custom groups, making them easier to annotate and review together. This natively enables multi-tile and multi-modal workflows.
- Enhanced Management: Data Groups provide improved file list views, streamlined Project queues, and integrated analytics, allowing you to manage multiple files per task.
- Flexible Layouts & DICOM Support: Apply layouts at the group level to create diverse annotation arrangements within a single Project. This also includes new support for DICOM series, expanding modality capabilities.
- Backward Compatibility: Label exports from Data Groups remain compatible with previous Editor Layouts functionality.
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Invitations & Resource Management (BETA): We’ve updated the UX around managing users in your Organization and assigning them to resources across Encord, providing better visibility and control over user onboarding.
- Streamlined User Distinction: We’ve removed the “internal” versus “external” user distinction, simplifying user categorization.
- New Organization-Level Roles: Introducing two new organization-level roles for improved user management:
- Workforce Manager: Ideal for those managing external teams or labeling vendors.
- Collaborator: A role with limited access, designed for external users or internal annotators and reviewers.
- Centralized Project Assignment: You can now assign users to Projects directly from the Organization settings page. Simply click ‘User Details’ to assign a user to one or multiple Projects.
- Simplified User Removal: The ‘User details’ screen is now also your consolidated location for removing users from your Organization.
- Editable Workflows: You now have the ability to edit the Workflows of existing Projects providing increased flexibility to adapt your annotation processes as Project needs evolve.
- Flexible Task Movement: Tasks can now be flexibly moved to any stage of the Workflow, providing greater control and adaptability in managing your Project.
- Data Registration: We’ve expanded the automated cloud synced folder functionality to cover all single file data types, now including audio, PDF, and text files alongside visual data. This enhancement eliminates the need for manual SDK data uploads and separate JSON file processes, immensely reducing the time it takes to register your data with Encord. Note that DICOM and image groups are still not supported in cloud-synced folders.
- Cloud Synced Folders SDK: You can now create and sync cloud-synced folders using the SDK, enabling you to manage their entire lifecycle programmatically.
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Organization Analytics:The new Organization Analytics provide actionable insights into your Organization’s performance and activity, including:
- Activity: Monitor overall organizational engagement.
- Collaborators: Offers analytics for each organization member across all Projects.
- Projects: Provides analytics for all Projects in your Organization.
- Annotator Training: You can now use workflow Projects to create annotator training Projects for assessing and upskilling your annotation workforces. This was previously only possible using the now deprecated Manual QA Projects. Learn how to create annotator training Projects here.
- Centralized Project Tag Management: Create, manage, and track all your Project Tags in a single, consolidated view. Project tags help you easily group and find your Projects. Additionally, you can track and analyze your Projects by tags within the new Organization Analytics.
- Nested Classifications Behavior: Nested classifications and attributes are now closed by default. This change makes deeply nested Ontologies more manageable and improves the initial look of complex annotation interfaces. For those who prefer the previous behavior, a new option in the Label Editor settings allows you to revert to the always-expanded view.
- Relation Attributes: We’ve improved the Relation Attributes user experience. Objects linked using Relation Attributes now display arrows, visually indicating their relationship and making it easier to understand that object labels are connected.
- Multiple Label Selection: Multiple labels can now be selected and reviewed at the same time, accelerating your review workflows.
- SDK Timers: Programmatically use SDK timers to view the time spent on your Projects, Stages, Tasks, individual Users, and more. This granular control provides valuable insights for optimizing your annotation workflows.
- Issues & Comments SDK: You can now add and manage issues and comments directly using the SDK.
- Project Status SDK: Programmatically change the status of your Projects with the SDK.
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Agent Action Tracking SDK: We’ve added
last_actioned_byto agents, providing better visibility into which agent performed the last action on a task. - SDK Support for Cloud Synced Folders: You can now create and sync cloud-synced folders using the SDK.
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The Issues feature is now officially out of Beta and fully released. Features include:
- Issue tags: can be applied to issues and can be tracked in the Project Analytics. Built for project admins and team managers, this part of the Issues feature focuses data-driven quality monitoring and enables better team training and labeling guideline improvements.
- Issues & comments: Users can add Issues to annotation and review tasks to streamline communication and feedback without sacrificing speed. Each issue supports comment threads linked to a specific label, an entire task, a specific frame, or a precise canvas location.
An end-to-end guide for working with issues can be found here.
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Encord Agents: We’ve removed
opencv-pythonas a required dependency. Instead,opencv-python-headlessis now included in the optionalencord-agentspackage. This change reduces bundle size and improves compatibility with serverless environments, which is especially useful for Editor and Task agents. If you’re using features that rely on visual dependencies (for exampledep_single_frame,dep_video_sampler), make sure to include the appropriate dependency version. A warning message appears if it’s missing. -
Search by
data_hash: You can now search bydata_hashin the task queue to access a particular task directly, and identify which Workflow stage a specific data unit is in. This makes debugging and tracking progress more efficient. -
Workforce Management: A new Workforce Manager user role is now available at the Organization level, enabling your 3rd-party workforces to self-organize without the need for Organization admin involvement. Workforce managers:
- Can create and manage user groups
- Add user groups to Projects they are an Admin or Team Manager of
- Can only view Org admins and users they’ve personally invited, and see groups they’ve created or have been assigned to as a manager.
The Workforce Manager feature is available in Encord Labs.
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Enhanced Metadata Support for Text and PDF Files: You can now include
textMetadataandpdfMetadatain your JSON files when uploading from cloud storage. These fields let you specify values such as file size directly, eliminating the need for Encord to retrieve them during upload or registration. This significantly speeds up data imports and supports strict client-only access for sensitive text and document workflows. - Updated Timer Analytics: We’ve improved Encord’s native time tracking to now measure to the nearest second, up from 15-second intervals previously. Our timing algorithm has been tuned to better accounts for inactivity during annotation tasks. The native timer data appears on dashboards within 5 minutes of recording.
- Editor Settings Template (Beta): Project Admins can now create and apply Editor Settings Templates to ensure all users in a Project start with consistent configurations. Users can still switch to personal settings if needed, and templates can be saved for future use across Projects. Contact your customer success manager to gain access to editor settings templates.
- Organization Admins Can Remove Project Admins: Organization admins can now remove Project admins from the list of collaborators in Projects.
- Minimizable Accept/Reject Modal: The Accept/Reject All Labels modal in the frame view can now be minimized to prevent it from obscuring media.
- Hotkey for Tile Navigation: Use Option + S on Mac, or Alt + S on Windows to quickly cycle through annotatable/reviewable tiles.
- Persistent Scroll Position: The left-side panel’s scroll position remains intact when switching focus between tiles, preventing loss of context.
- Stable Panel Width: The width of the left-side panel now persists after adjustments, ensuring a consistent view across tasks.
- Improved Video Playback: Videos now replay using the space bar without needing to reset to the first frame manually.
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Polygon Enhancements: The Polygon Pane now opens automatically when clicking or creating polygons in the Label Editor, providing easy access to essential editing tools. Users can:
- Add vertices seamlessly.
- Create polygons using the Polygon Brush.
- Toggle Move Mode to reposition entire polygons.
- Duplicate polygons in place for precise adjustments.
- Instantly access the eraser tool.
- Drag vertices to refine shapes with greater control.
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Bulk Class Change: Easily update multiple label classes at once by selecting several labels and changing their class in bulk using the hotkey
cor th. This streamlines the workflow and improves efficiency. -
Improved Label Navigation and Selection: Navigating and managing labels is now more seamless, making it easier to work with complex projects.
- Finding and interacting with labels is now more intuitive, especially for Projects with many labels.
- Hovering over a label in the left panel highlights the corresponding object on the canvas.
- Selecting a label in the panel now selects it on the canvas, improving navigation clarity.
- Multiple selected labels are visually distinguished with a blue outline and an enclosing box.
- The right-click context menu has been reorganized for better visibility and easier access to actions.
These release notes include editor related features released since the start of 2025.
- Comments & Issues (BETA): Users can now add issues to annotation and review tasks to communicate with other users. Issues support comment threads that relate to the entire task or specific sections. A notification badge indicates unresolved issues, which can be filtered by Resolved and Unresolved. Issues can be attached to a task, a specific frame, or a precise location on the canvas. Additionally, rejection issues provide clear feedback when a reviewer rejects a task, ensuring better communication and annotation quality. This feature is in BETA. Contact the Encord team to try this feature.
- Improved multi-tile review flow: Introducing read-only tiles (for example for prompts), and quick switching between focused tiles with a new hotkey.
- Ontology descriptions: Add descriptions to elements in your Ontology so that they’re easily available as hints to annotators and reviewers.
- Task Pre-Fetching: A new setting enables the Label Editor to pre-load the next image in the queue, significantly reducing wait times and ensuring a seamless workflow when moving between image tasks.
- Complex Polygon Support: The Label Editor now supports complex polygons, improving annotation capabilities for intricate shapes such as polygons with holes in them.
- Bulk Polygon Operations: Performance enhancements enable efficient handling of hundreds of polygons at once.
- Polygon Subtraction & Merging: New tools allow for subtracting and merging polygons, improving shape manipulation capabilities.
- Polylines with Arrows: Users can now add directional arrows to polylines, for cases where vector and direction are important.
- Locking objects: In order to avoid accidentally adjusting existing objects, you can now lock them in place and make them unselectable on the canvas.
- Layers and ordering upgrade: Layers are much more obvious with ordering in the left panel, and the ability to choose the exact object you want when clicking in an overlapping area.
- Selection UX enhancements: When selecting objects you can see how many objects, and precisely which objects are selected using a count and a subtle enclosing box.
- Square brush: Use brush tools in bitmask or polygon editing with a square brush.
- Quick erase UX: Enable eraser quickly with an added hotkey within editing mode.
- SAM on MPR Volumes: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) can now be used on MPR DICOM volumes, expanding AI-assisted annotation capabilities.
- Improved Editor Performance for Large DICOM Volumes: Rendering optimizations ensure a smoother experience when working with large DICOM Datasets, particularly for sample perceptive data.
- Scroll locking: We introduced a toggle to synchronize scrolling between series. Helpful for comparing treatment effects, or with reference studies.
These release notes include platform related features released since the start of 2025. Look out for our Editor Release Notes tomorrow for more updates!
- Cloud-synced folders (BETA): Register your cloud data by syncing your cloud storage bucket directly with Encord. This feature is in BETA. Contact the Encord team to try this feature.
- Improved Error Handling for Cloud Uploads: We’ve enhanced error handling for data uploads from cloud storage to Encord. When issues are detected in the upload JSON, users now receive clearer, more informative error messages, making troubleshooting and resolving upload issues easier.
- File Downloads: Users with the necessary permissions can now download files directly from the Files interface, making it easier to access and reference files when needed.
- COCO Exporter: We’ve updated the COCO exporter, which now includes complex polygons.
- Updated Project Analytics Dashboard: We’ve upgraded our Analytics tab to a scalable, event-based system, offering:
- Workflow and Agent-native performance metrics to track efficiency and quality.
- Advanced filtering for deeper insights and more precise comparisons.
- Upgraded CSV exports for seamless external reporting and analysis.
- Move Tasks Directly to Complete / Archive: Tasks can now be directly moved to the “Complete” or “Archive” stage in the UI, bypassing unnecessary steps.
- New Filters for Task Queue: Users can now filter the task queue the presence or absence of comments, and unassigned status, making it easier to manage and locate tasks.