Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us

19th June, 2009, 2:12 pm | No comments yet |

Full integration with 23!

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Avedon release, 23 and Polar Rose now bring you a totally integrated experience! From yesterday users could sign up from the Polar Rose site and select 23 as a photo source, instead of Flickr. Now any 23 user has a new faces tab (Link will work for 23 users only), in the 23 user interface, from which they can enable Polar Rose directly. Clicking the button there, takes you straight to Polar Rose, with all information we need to connect to your photos. You only need to log in with Facebook Connect and select which photos you want us to take. The rest is all taken care of!


So if you’re a 23 user, give this a try right now! If you’re not, why not give their service a spin? Its free!


Stay tuned, there is still loads more to come…

18th June, 2009, 6:33 pm | No comments yet |

New release – Codename: Avedon

Twiggy, January 1968, © 2008 the Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon brought action to fashion photography. Instead of static models smiling, his images are full of motion and emotion.
Avedon, the Polar Rose release too focuses on action, just in time for the Reboot conference (this year theme is action). Action on performance and action on photo sources!


Going cross domain, with 23 photo support!


We’ve been working closely with our friends at 23 (our co-sponsors at last year’s Reboot) to provide full integration with their photo sharing service. Starting now, you can select 23 as a photo source right after signing up at Polar Rose. Just like with Flickr we’ll send photo-notes back, with links to each person on Polar Rose. We’re treating 23 photos just like Flickr ones, so your photo identity could soon consist of photos from both places! So if you’re a 23 user and have been aching to give Polar Rose a go, now is the time!


A big thanks to the team at 23 for making this happen!


This is step one in our cross-domain strategy. We’ll be adding more photo sources very soon!


Performance


On top of countless back-end changes to improve performance, especially on processing your photos, we now feature immediate feedback on processing status. We’ll show the status of your photos almost immediately after adding a photo-source. You’ll see which photos are still processing and which ones are done already. The status will be updated continuously, without the need to manually refresh the page.


Facebook messaging improvements


Recently we started asking for Facebook Stream publishing permissions. Now we’re putting them to good use: No more annoying popups while naming! Also, you’ll be properly informed when someone starts following your photostream and when we’ve ingested any new photos you have uploaded to 23 or Flickr.


Not a person button


This is by far the most requested feature on our Get Satisfaction support page. Starting now, you’ll find a “This is not a person” button in the naming modal. Use this button when asked to name something that clearly isn’t a face, and the facebox will not bother you any longer.
You can always draw the face again, using “Edit tags” if you change your mind. We will use the data from these non-faces to improve our face-detection in the future.


There are also the usual minor improvements and bugfixes. One thing to highlight though is that merging two people from the People page should now work properly. Click “edit details” for a person there and edit the name. Select the person to merge with from the autocomplete list and after a couple of seconds the two identities should be merged.


Enjoy!

18th June, 2009, 12:23 pm | Comments Off |

Major update underway!

Today Polar Rose will be temporarily down, while we install a major update to our service. This might take a bit of time, as there are loads of changes and improvements that need to be installed. So sit back, relax and check back again later today!