Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
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!
Funny Duplicates
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.
Welcoming our first partner…
Only a few days after moving from private to public beta we’ve now opened up for partners as well by releasing the Polar Rose Widget.
This first release is initially for partners to test the functionality on their websites. Over the next few weeks will be getting to feedback and making updates and improvements. We will announce when the widget is fully open to all.
Our first partner – Jalbum
Jalbum is one of the fastest growing photo sharing communities in the world. Jalbum photo albums can have any look, functionality and can be published to any site. Millions of photo albums are distributed over 100’s of thousands of web servers globally, with a current rate of 90 million monthly page views.
Our friends at Jalbum are currently finalizing the remaining tasks to have the widget available to all their users as an opt-in feature. You can get a sneak preview of the widget in action at http://davidekholm.jalbum.net/faces/.
We’re very happy to have Jalbum as our first partner and welcome the Jalbum team and users to Polar Rose.
PS. Read more about the partner widget here http://info.polarrose.com/partners/ where you’ll find a presentation, technical specifications and everything else needed to get started. Remember that we’re some days off from the public release so changes can still occur and please use for testing only.
