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!
New release – Codename: Arbus
Diane Arbus – a photographer who was captivated by all kinds of people and tried to portray them the way they really were. Some in a very direct way, like the giant on the left, others more subtle like the woman with the poodle-shaped hair. Arbus, the Polar Rose release also focuses on highlighting the individual…
Sharing of individual photos
In our UI you will now notice a couple of clear changes. Gone are the links to “Edit tags” and “Show original” and in come clearly marked buttons to “Edit tags” and “Share this”. The latter is really the big thing. Click “Share this” and up pops a panel with five different ways of sharing the photo with other people.
First off you can share using a Facebook wallpost, a Twitter tweet or a link on Digg. These all use our new short-URL service: polarro.se – we’ve been told that sort of thing is all the rage these days! The upshot is that you get a nice short link to the photo in question, with all the face boxes, names and links that a Polar Rose enabled photo has.
Of course you can also just grab the short URL directly and share that however you like. At the bottom left of the sharing panel there is a “Email this photo to a friend” link as well, which will helpfully paste it into an email for you. Of course, if you just click the link it’ll show you the photo in question, by itself in what we call the “permalink page”.
This “permalink page” is also what you will see if you click on a Polar Rose link from Facebook, for instance when you’ve been named. Which brings us to…
Facebook messaging changes
Currently when you name, as post is made on your behalf on your wall, saying that you’ve named (for example) Aunt Tilly. That is great, but it is easily missed by Aunt Tilly. Also it might be that most of your friends have no idea who Aunt Tilly is, and therefore think the message isn’t very interesting to them. With this release we’re changing this behavior.
In line with Facebook’s latest development direction, we are now posting a message on your behalf on Aunt Tilly’s wall instead. This message can only be seen by you, Aunt Tilly and people that know the both you together. This makes sure Aunt Tilly gets to see the photos of herself that you named and at the same time makes sure that the message isn’t shown to people for whom this holds no interest.
If you are naming people without providing a Facebook contact, we’ll still post to your own wall, but no more than 3 times a day, so as to keep the volume of messages down. Also, if you name continuously, Facebook will neatly collapse these three messages in to one item on your stream for you.
Privacy Improvements
In this release we’ve made our privacy system more straight-forward. Public accounts and friends-only/private accounts continue to work as normal, with photos and names either being shown to the world, or only to friends.
However, if you name someone and they haven’t yet signed up we now show only the first name of the person. We’ve been doing this for some time – by popular request – for our Flickr photo notes, but now it is that way across the site. That way friends and family can still easily get to these photos without giving too much away.
Finally, if you name someone without providing contact details, we will treat the name as a normal tag, meaning it will be fully visible to everyone, as if it was public. This is because we of course in that case can’t ask the person in question how they want to appear, so we’re leaving it up to the person naming to decide what’s best.
We welcome any feedback on these changes over on our GetSatisfaction site (it will be easier for us to track there, so please don’t use the comments on this blog).
Getting this right is important to us – so please let us know what you think!
Finally…
Of course this release contains the usual small fixes and tweaks, including some subtle changes to the look and feel. Much more to come in the next release, including quite likely, the most commonly requested feature of all…
New features!
As the number of photos and Polar Rose explorers steadily grows, so does the number of features on our site. In our last post we described our rough roadmap and we are happy to announce a bunch of new features from that list.
Favorites
This is a way for you to mark photos that you like. Just click the star icon underneath the thumbnail. Photos marked as favorites will end up on your favorites page.
New menu
We are making it easier to agree and suggest names or AKA’s directly on the photos on our site. Clicking on the face thumbnails will present a menu that lets you enter or agree to names just like when using the plugin. The menu also has the following functions which are enabled by marking the appropriate check-boxes:
- This is me! – This is a way for you to show the world who you are. Photos marked as “me” will end up on your “me” page. There will also be some other fun things to do with these photos in the future.
- User avatars – This allows you to select a face to be your avatar.
- Adult content filter – Marking photos as adult content will let you and other users filter those images in your results. Photos with adult content are moderated. In your account settings page you can enable or disable the filtering of adult content.
Grid view
The grid view is a great navigational tool for quickly browsing through results on pages. It comes in two sizes and shows thumbnails arranged in a grid structure – 5-by-5 (large thumbnails) or 10-by-10 (small thumbnails).
Finally…
A lot of people are asking us when they will be let in to try out the stuff we are talking about. We are quickly ramping up the number of invites and still selecting them at random from those who have signed up. If you haven’t received an invite email, please have patience.
We also have a surprise ready for next week… more on that later.
And remember, your feedback is always welcome.
