Thanks to Tomek, Tomek, Mikael and the rest of our team, we can finally show off something we have been playing with internally for some time.
Our Polarbot is here!

Polarbot is a little script that looks for unnamed people in photos we find across the web and checks against named near-duplicates. This means that we can now spread the names contributed by our users to more photos, thus making more stuff searchable and more information available when browsing with the plugin.

We have more ways of spreading the data and increasing our reach planned, stay tuned and do check in on our Polarbot from time to time to see what he is up to.

Recently, we launched the detection of duplicate faces. Since we rely only on the face, we are able to match any version of the image as soon as the face remains the same. This is of interest not only to find the best quality version of an image but also to discover all kinds of modifications.

Today we released some new features to the Polar Rose website and plugin – detection of duplicate images, statistics and a new functionality in the plugin to make it easier to notify us about bugs.

Duplicates

Duplicate detection means that multiple versions of the same image are grouped together – making it easier for you to get an overview of results for a particular person.

Simply click the link shown above an image that has duplicates and you will open a page showing all the duplicates – even if some images have been cropped, scaled or had other modifications made to them they will still be shown on this page.

When you browse the page of duplicates of an image you can also see all the different websites that the image has be found at.

Statistics

Under the search field on the Polar Rose home page there are now links to pages that show the most popular searches, most named people and the top users on Polar Rose.

Flag as bug

The Polar Rose plugin now includes a checkbox which allows you to quickly and easily flag bugs (roses that appear on things other than faces). Doing this helps us to improve our face recognition and show better results when you search on the Polar Rose website.

Thanks to the Netvibes Universal Widget API, you can now show photos from Polar Rose on your home page (Netvibes/iGoogle), desktop (Apple dashboard/Vista sidebar) or even your website or blog.

You can personalize the widget by setting the name of the person, and show either a thumbnail of the photograph or a mugshot of the face. If Polar Rose doesn’t currently have any photos of this person, you can easily tag some photos with our plugin and they will automatically appear in the widget!

Happy times. After yesterday’s introduction of Jalbum as our initial partner we’re very exited bringing on another two great partners today.

23

23 is the visual sharing company. Its products help individuals, groups, businesses and institutions to act visually in more than 200 countries across the globe on a daily basis.

Twitxr

Twitxr is a mobile photosharing service that lets users easily share pictures and status updates from any mobile phone with their friends on Twitxr, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. Twitxr has a great iPhone app with automatic geotagging of pictures, plus Windows Mobile and Java applications for most cameraphones around. Additionally users can send pictures and text updates using any mobile device via email and mobile web.

We really look forward working with these fantastic sites, their users, and the people behind.