Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
The New Polar Rose is out!
This morning we pushed the button for a major new Polar Rose release. And with absolute lack of modesty, we’re thrilled of the results and the new possibilities that Polar Rose now opens.
Flickr + Facebook
The new Polar Rose lets you name people in your Flickr photos using your Facebook contacts. We’ll automatically detect people in your photos, let you name these using your Facebook contacts, and suggest other photos that we think are of the same person.
We’ll even notify that friend on Facebook that they’ve been named in your photos and provide them the ability to control whether they want their name in public or not (until they sign up and decide for themselves, we’ll keep them private).
We kept hearing from people that they wanted Polar Rose for their Flickr photos – we think we got it right. And for those of you with photos elsewhere, don’t worry; we’ll be adding more photo sharing sites as soon as we’re over the first few weeks of corrections and adjustments.
For a list of features, see http://info.polarrose.com/features/
Privacy
One thing that we heard time after time during the beta phase was a concern over privacy – that naming a person in a public photo was a potential infringement of that person’s privacy. Unfortunately there was little we could do to allow the person named to control this. Naming a person and identifying him or her with a Facebook contact or email address allows Polar Rose to verify that user when he or she visits Polar Rose and thus control how photos should be shared. Giving users full control over privacy was a major driver for the new Polar Rose.
Help us out…
As with any software project, there were things that were left out last minute. We’ll be making adjustments and fixing some minor bugs over the next few days, and the next release is slated already for tomorrow. Nonetheless, we want to hear from you! Head on over to Get Satisfaction’s Customer Support Community for Polar Rose or talk to us on Twitter.
A big thanks!
I want to thank all my colleagues who’ve put in long hours over the past months to make this big new release possible. You’ve done an amazing job from picking up the initial seeds of ideas all the way to creating a fantastic product.
Lastly, my gratitude goes to the handful of thousand beta-testers that both helped shape our algorithms for detection, given us an understanding of the not unsizable infrastructure needed to do near-realtime processing of photos, pinched us on privacy issues, and lastly helped guide us towards the product that we now launched. You guys have been enduring, patient and simply rock!
If i authorize/sign in with facebook connect, would it be impossible to fetch all my albums i have on facebook, and use them instead of creating an album on Flickr, and upload all of them, again?
Johan,
We could, but the problem is the restrictions that Facebook puts on content within Facebook. According to Facebook’s terms of service we can only keep the photos for 24 (or 48) hours before we have to delete them…
/n
So if (a) I was a Polar Rose user before the new site launched and (b) I purposefully cancelled my Facebook account and have no interest in resuscitating it, is there any way that I can use Polar Rose now?
Peter,
We’ll have support for one or more of the networks I know you are on, shortly. Sorry!
/n
A note, you still have your old stuff located at http://search.polarrose.com :)
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