Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
New release – Codename: Leiter
Today we launched a major new release of Polar Rose, which we’ve codenamed Leiter. Saul Leiter is a photographer who’s photos often figure street scenes with lots of activity. Leiter, the Polar Rose release, focuses on activity too as its headline feature is…
Activity Streams
As soon as you log in to Polar Rose, you’ll be presented with a new homepage. On this page we’ll show you all the activity around photos that has taken place in your social network. If your friends are uploading new photos or name people, it’ll show up here. If someone follows you, it’ll show up here.
Did any of your friends just get named (even if that was by someone outside your network) it too will pass by on the activity stream. Its your personal newsfeed on your social photo network!
But that’s not all…
Streamlined signup
We are writing about this here, because no-one will notice any difference otherwise. New users don’t know what the sign up was like before and existing users have no need to sign up again. In any case, take our word for it: sign up has been stripped to the bone.
We’re talking one click, a log in to Facebook Connect and your done. From there new users are guided in a better way through adding their Flickr photos (and soon photos from other sites!) too. Best of all, the whole things look like a million bucks. Good stuff all around!
We’re still not done though, here’s an often requested feature:
Increased photo processing limit
As some of you know, we used make your last 5000 Flickr photos available for naming. With this release, that limit has been doubled for photos and quadrupled for faces. That’s 10000 photos and 20000 faces. Hopefully this will allow even more people to name every photo in their collection.
The best part is that if you had more than 5000 photos in Flickr, you should be able to take advantage of this pretty much straight away!
And finally…
Besides loads of small bug-fixes and improvements here and there, two further items should be mentioned: we are now automatically updating your Facebook contacts, so you no longer need to press the button on your settings to get up to date. Also, we are also turning on the full Flickr sync that we promised earlier. It needed some testing and improvement, but now it is ready to go.
Over the next day or so you should start seeing your stream getting updated correctly. If you have made chances to your Flickr settings after joining, you’ll start seeing those changes reflected. Be careful though, as we will not retain photos that do not match the settings you selected!
We hope you’ll enjoy the new features. Have fun using Polar Rose!
Duplicates, statistics & flag as bug…
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.
The big update we have all been waiting for!
Today we release a new site with a cleaner simpler look & feel. The main focus of this release is improved search functionality including clustered search results (stacks as we like to call them) based on facial similarity.
The Polar Rose plugin is now available for Internet Explorer (version 7) so please try it out and report any bugs that you find! We also made some modifications to the plugin user interface to bring it in line with the new site look.
User interface improvements…
The main goal of the user interface re-design was to make searching and browsing results easier and more intuitive. We also wanted to simplify the other interaction points (forms, settings etc.) and the plugin user interface. Finally we wanted to create a user interface which is easier to expand upon and add new functionality to.
Look out for an upcoming post with more about the future user interface developments we are working on.
Under the hood…
We have built a new flexible and scalable infrastructure to support increased numbers of users – more beta invites will be sent out soon! We also now utilize a content delivery network (CDN) to make the output of search queries faster.
In closing…
Todays release represents a lot of hard work by the whole team at Polar Rose and we all look forward to your feedback and comments. We are already busy designing and developing many improvements and new features which we will be releasing over the coming weeks and months!