Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
New update released!
Keen-eyed users have probably spotted it already: We just launched our first major update since our launch! We have actually been making loads of smaller updates throughout the last couple of weeks, but this is the first release with visible changes for our users.
The headline features are:
- “People” tab now only displays the people in your own photos – one place to go to see all the people in your own photos.
- The “People you are following”, which was a sub-tab underneath “People”, is now a tab of its own – we hope this will make the idea of following other users more clear and visible.
- The “Your Photos” now only shows the photos you took – previously it also showed photos of you, which was a bit confusing.
- Double the number of photos and people on each page, to make it faster to consume all the content!
- RSS support for the Your Photos and Photos of You pages, so you can subscribe to updates using your favorite newsreader!
- Improved synchronization with Flickr – changes to your Flickr settings on the site will now be processed fully and changes made on Flickr (for example deleting a photo) will also be correctly transferred to Polar Rose.
All of the above changes and improvements are currently available to all users except for the improved Flickr synchronization which will take effect for all users on Monday 4th May.
If you had previously changed your Flickr settings on Polar Rose (for example from “public photos” to “public & private photos”) you should soon see photos appearing – if you do the reverse you should see photos disappearing. The same goes if you switched to only getting photos with a certain Flickr tag, all photos without your chosen Flickr tag will be removed.
Besides these visible changes we’ve fixed a lot of bugs (large and small) as well.
We are already hard at work on the next release, which amongst other things will contain a better way to see what is going on in your social photo network! You’ll also start seeing some of the changes suggested by Polar Rose users over at Get Satisfaction too!
With each release we are trying to make Polar Rose even better! Please feel free to let us know how we are doing.
Delay in import of photos Friday
Flickr had some interruptions for a few hours this morning that affected the import of new photos into Polar Rose. It looks like most is resolved by now.
Fix out for Flickr Import
As many of you have experienced during the first day of operation of the new Polar Rose, your photos from Flickr were not appearing as quickly as anticipated. This has now been fixed with a release that went out 30 minutes ago, and we apologize for the inconvenience.
The reason for the delayed import of photos was two-fold: our network setup between our European data center, our servers at Amazon Web Services, and Flickr; and a bug in the generation of your individual photo stream which is cached for performance.
A big thanks to our colleagues in the Warsaw team who chased down this bug in the early hours of today (you’re an ace, Piotr!), and to Flickr for helping us identify where on our end the issues were arising.
A few other fixes, optimizations and minor user interface improvements also went out in the same release so please let us know if you have any other problems or suggestions for improvements. We’re all ears.