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!
View, organize and share photos from anywhere in one place
First Flickr, now Facebook Photos; Polar Rose has become the premier destination for viewing, naming, and sharing photos between users and sites. Using our refined auto-tagging tool, Polar Rose has made it easier and quicker than ever to organize pictures and create people-centric albums.
Polar Rose loves photos and most people share that passion with us. We all love to share and view photos of ourselves and our friends online, but no one wants to be locked in to a single site to host their photos. Most of us forget to or can’t take the time to tag, making photos hard to find and even harder to share in a meaningful way.
Polar Rose now supports sharing your photos across Flickr, Facebook Photos and 23hq.com, with many more to come.
- Stay up to date – Keep up with photos from your friends and family on Flickr or Facebook in one place and let your friends and family keep up with yours. It’s like a single photo album you share with all the people you care about.
- Auto-tag your photos – Find and auto-tag photos using fantastic face recognition. Together you create a people-centric photo album by effortlessly naming people in photos.
- Share with your friends – Automatically share your photos with the people who are in them by email or on Facebook!
For details of the latest release take a look at the release blog post.
Have fun & see you in there!
