Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
New release, codename: Winogrand
Gary Winogrand was an american photographer, known for his – often witty – street photography. One of more famous quotes is “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs”. Gary Winogrand left behind huge quantity of unedited photographs and thousands of rolls of undeveloped film. Winogrand, the Polar Rose release, aims make it easier to get a view of all your photos and those made by your friends. The headline feature is:
Upload sets
It has always been possible to see all of your friends’ photos using the “All photos” tab. The problem often was that if your brother uploaded all his latest holiday photos at once, it would push all other photos out of the way. All of a sudden those important photos of your best friend’s wedding were on page 36. Not any more!
All photos uploaded on the same day by the same person are grouped into a set. Each sets shows exactly how many photos it contains, who uploaded the phots and when. But that’s not all! Mouse over the set from left to right and it will show you a preview of some of the photos in the set. Try it! It’s pretty cool!
This way you can quickly skim huge amounts of photos from yourself and your friends.
Clicking on any of the preview photos immediately takes you to our new combined photo and set page. Here you’ll see the photo at a much larger size, complete with faceboxes. Scroll down and you’ll see an overview of all the photos in the set. Click to see the one you want, or use the previous/next navigation at the top to get around!
We’ll even remember exactly where you came from, no matter how much browsing you do. Just click “back to my photos” and you’ll dropped right back in the overview in the right place.
What is more, photos of yourself and other people are now also displayed as sets. Overall this makes browsing around you and your friends’ photo on Polar Rose a much richer experience!
Improved batch naming
The goodness doesn’t stop there though. We’ve also improved our naming dialogs. This might seem like a small change, but it makes all the difference! The way we until now handled auto-complete in the naming dialog meant that you often weren’t sure whether you named a face using a Facebook account or just with plain text name. You could also easily end up creating multiple identities out of a single person, if you weren’t careful. What is more, it could also be hard to create two people with the same name.
Our new naming dialog and auto-complete solve these issues. If you type a name that doesn’t exist in your list of contacts it will clearly show that. It will also immediately offer the option to add an email address for that person (no more “Tell them about these photos” screen!) .
If the name you are typing uniquely matches one from your list of contacts, it autocompletes and highlights the part of the text that it has completed. If you disagree, just keep typing the right name. If you want to create a new person with the same name, just uncheck the box. Its easier to try than to explain!
Although it may seem like a little thing, the new auto-complete makes all the difference and we’re very excited about it!
In closing
As usual there are lots of smaller changes and fixes, sprinkled around the site. We hope you’ll enjoy all the new functionality!
A new face at Polar Rose to lead mobile growth
We’re excited to announce the appointment of Carl Silbersky as the new CEO of Polar Rose. Carl brings to Polar Rose experience from the mobile industry where we’re seeing a particularly steep growth of interest in Polar Rose’s technology.
Since I started working with Polar Rose in 2006 – initially as an outside seed investor and since as CEO – the company has cracked some of the biggest challenges in computer vision (ie. science of making computers ’see’). Yet, the truest value has been proving – at Internet-scale – the utility of face recognition in photo albums of general end-users.
For the past six months we have quietly been working on making our technology and solutions available to a new group of customers – the mobile manufacturers and operators. Our showcase website at www.polarrose.com is built on the same infrastructure and technology that we are now providing in the form of a range of new solutions.
For a hint of what you’ll see Polar Rose power, have a look at the video and screenshots at the bottom of this post.
Achieving success in the mobile market will require someone at the helm who has managed and grown relationships with the largest operators and manufacturers. Carl comes from a position within the exec team at Tactel, one of the most successful mobile solution providers in Europe.
In my new role as a non-exec director of the board of directors, I will continue to be close to Polar Rose. I wish Carl as fruitful years as I have had and look forward to helping guide the company towards new opportunities.
