Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
When it comes to photos, your cell phone is ready for something new!
In 2008 statistics showed that 74% of the people in Sweden, between the ages 9-79 use a cell phone on a daily basis. Worldwide in 2008 there were 3.9 billion cell phone subscribers and by 2013 this number is expected to hit 5.6 billion. A survey in the U.S showed that out of 2000 people from different income classes, ages and gender, 45.9 % use their cellphone camera at least once a week. One in five people said that their cell phone is their primary camera. Whether the camera is used to document a night out, take flirtatious photos of yourself or to take a photo and attach to your contact does not matter. It’s the frequency that is interesting.
Another survey conducted by Harrison Group shows that 46% of people in the age group 13-24 embrace their cell phones as an entertainment device. 56% of all consumers take photos with their phones, including 37% in the age group 61-75. So even if kids may think of their cell phone as an entertainment tool, older people use it as an entertainment tool as well. Camera phones outsold basic digital still cameras by almost 4 to 1 in 2005 already and it looks like it is only going up.
Flickr have a whole statistics section where they keep an eye of how many photos are shot by different cameras. A big number of camera phones are represented and by looking at the numbers you can see that almost 15 million photos are taken with an iPhone compared to 35 million photos taken with a Nikon D40 which came out the same year as the first iPhone. It is impossible to compare the photo quality of these cameras since the technology in the Nikon is so much more advanced than the iPhone. The equivalent to the iPhone (measured in megapixel) would be the Coolpix 2500 with 2,5 million photos on Flickr, which is almost nothing.
With this increase of photos taken with a camera phone there are also a lot of different applications out there today to help people snap a photo and upload it to different social networks in just one click. They then most often sit in in a folder called ”Mobile uploads” with all kinds of photos mixed together. How come you have to solve the rest on a computer?
What I’m talking about is the tagging and the organizing to be able to share the photos with people. Imagine to be able to snap a photo, get name suggestions of the people in the photo and tag the people right there in your phone before you send it away to your social network. The photos would get organized directly through the people who are in them AND the people in the photos would get notified directly.
Untagged photos may soon be a thing of the past.
Thanks for the feedback – we’ve been listening!
There has been lots of great feedback about the recent “Sander” release of Polar Rose, a big thanks to everyone for your articles and comments. We have been listening to your input and ideas – two of them in particular have caught our attention…
A recurring theme was users wanting to be able to turn off the wall posts that are posted to a users Facebook wall when they have been naming people.
To be clear on this issue, Polar Rose sends two types of messages via Facebook:
- Notifications to other Facebook users when (and ONLY when) you name them in a photo – notifications to you when your photos are processed or someone requests to follow you.
- A wall post with daily summary of your activity on Polar Rose which is added a maximum of once per day IF there has been any activity in your Polar Rose account.
Another theme was users wanting control over whether tags were synchronized between Polar Rose and the source (Facebook, Flickr etc.) where the original photo came from. Some users don’t want these tags (or photo notes in the case of Flickr) being added to their photos.
We listened and…
We just pushed out a minor release which adds both the functionality to turn off daily summary wall posts (point 2 in the list above) – plus the functionality to disable the synchronization of tags.
Both of these settings can be found on your settings page.
Let us know what you think, and keep the feedback coming!
View, organize and share photos from anywhere in one place
First Flickr, now Facebook Photos; Polar Rose has become the premier destination for viewing, naming, and sharing photos between users and sites. Using our refined auto-tagging tool, Polar Rose has made it easier and quicker than ever to organize pictures and create people-centric albums.
Polar Rose loves photos and most people share that passion with us. We all love to share and view photos of ourselves and our friends online, but no one wants to be locked in to a single site to host their photos. Most of us forget to or can’t take the time to tag, making photos hard to find and even harder to share in a meaningful way.
Polar Rose now supports sharing your photos across Flickr, Facebook Photos and 23hq.com, with many more to come.
- Stay up to date – Keep up with photos from your friends and family on Flickr or Facebook in one place and let your friends and family keep up with yours. It’s like a single photo album you share with all the people you care about.
- Auto-tag your photos – Find and auto-tag photos using fantastic face recognition. Together you create a people-centric photo album by effortlessly naming people in photos.
- Share with your friends – Automatically share your photos with the people who are in them by email or on Facebook!
For details of the latest release take a look at the release blog post.
Have fun & see you in there!
