Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
Service closing down
As some of you may know, we launched a series of face recognition products during Mobile World Congress last february. The response to this has been phenomenal and we’ve been busy with requests from companies around the world ever since. This has unfortunately meant that we’ve not been able to give the service at polarrose.com the attention it needs. The site hasn’t seen a new release in quite some time and we’ve not been able to respond to our GetSatisfaction forum like we have in the past. This means that the site as it stands today is not up to the standard we set for it when we launched.
So we decided to make the tough choice of closing down the service (the website polarrose.com will remain but with focus on product info). We want to thank everybody that used the service and hope that it has been useful and fun while it lasted.
We will close down the service on September 6th 2010. At that point we’ll delete all user accounts and all the corresponding data, including any images we’ve downloaded from your Facebook and/or Flickr account and all the personal information you’ve provided to us.
Basically, we will delete everything!
Any tags we put on your photos on Flickr and Facebook will stay there. If you need any information from within polarrose.com you should log in before September 6th and get it. If you want to keep the names of the people in your photos, make sure you have writing tags turned on in your settings.
Thank you again for giving us a go!
Update 30/8:
Here is some additional specific information:
- Facebook tags will remain untouched. Facebook doesn’t allow tags to be deleted or modified, so they’ll stay put after we shut the service down
- We will remove the link from the photo notes on Flickr. Only a plain-text name will remain.
- If you want to have all photo notes from Flickr removed, you can do so by deleting your account before 6/9. Deleting your account will automatically delete all Flickr photo notes.
Site (almost) fully operational
After a brief outage due to issues with our Facebook integration, polarrose.com is back online again. Our ninjas managed to track down the problem and fixed it in record time! Thanks for your patience!
Update: There are still problems with Facebook Connect when trying to create a new account. Basically there is no way to accept the special permissions needed. Existing accounts should be fine. This problem is on the side of Facebook unfortunately and Polar Rose isn’t the only site that is affected. We’ll keep you posted.
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!