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!
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!
New release, codename: Sander
August Sander was a german portrait photographer, whose main interest was in recording the “People of the 20th Century”. An exhaustive set of photos documenting the faces of people from all walks of life and professions: doctors, bricklayers, soldiers, notaries, etc. His first book of these photos was called the “Face of our Time”. That was in 1929. Fast forward to today’s book of faces and you get the headline feature of todays release:
Facebook support
This is one of the bigger updates we’ve made so far. Loads of improvements all around, but this is the headline one. Lots of you have asked for this and we’ve been working on it for quite some time… now it is finally here! When you sign up for Polar Rose, we will by default import your Facebook photos (actually only those with privacy set as “friends only”, “friends of friends” and “everyone”). We of course keep the privacy intact, just like we do for Flickr.
If you name a Facebook contact on a Facebook photo, using Polar Rose, we will automatically put a tag on that photo in Facebook.
Note: Facebook automatically posts about this to the named person’s wall. This is an automated process Polar Rose cannot control. We’ll try and reduce the number of posts Facebook makes as much as we can, from our side, as soon as possible.
If you already have a Polar Rose account for your Flickr or 23 photos, you can now add your Facebook photos to it as well. Just click on the “Sources” option in the top right of screen.
Improved face recognition
Launching together with Facebook photo support is greatly enhanced face recognition. This should lead to higher accuracy and therefore allowing you to name the people in your photos even faster! We’ve got an aggressive schedule for further improvements as well, so expect even more in the future.
Name suggestions
This is also sometimes called auto-tagging. Based on our improved face recognition system, we will now suggest names for faces, if we feel they look enough like an already known face. This can happen both while in the naming process as well as when you click to name an individual face.
This gets better dependent on how many faces of each person we know!
Sign up improvements
To help Facebook users to sign up, we’ve now implemented a sign-up process that happens on Facebook itself. Instead of being taken to polarrose.com, you’ll be able to add the Polar Rose “application” on Facebook instead. Once you do and we’re done processing your photos, you’ll be taken to polarrose.com to use our service. Once you get there you will be all logged in and ready to use your new account. Our ninjas call it “single sign-on”.
The “old” sign up method still works too, by going to polarrose.com and signing up through Facebook Connect.
Speed improvements
Most of our web front-end was rewritten for this release. The HTML, the CSS, the javascript. The result is a much smoother and more responsive site. Of special note here is that fact that we now inject names for the faces directly in to the page, so you can use them right away, without having to wait for the page to reload.
There are loads of other smaller changes and fixes, as usual. The way we send messages on Facebook has changed for instance. Gone are the wall-posts, to be replaced by notifications again. Our hitpages now feature larger photo previews than before. If you name a person without using a Facebook contact we won’t keep asking you to provide an email address and so on.
Like always, we’d love you feedback on our GetSatisfaction page. There is loads of stuff to come on Polar Rose! Stay tuned!