Here's some frequently asked questions…
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I dont understand, what's going on – what do I use Polar Rose for?
To help you get acquainted with the various types of pages and what they do you can take a quick tour – you need to have created an account and be signed in to do this otherwise you wouldn't have any pages to tour!
We are doing some stuff that has never been done before online, so there is a bit of a learning curve to using the Polar Rose site – but we believe the fun and functionality that the site provides makes it worthwhile. We're nowhere near as complicated as Facebook, and you are on Facebook right?
As for some kind of misson statement, we have tried to distill down what Polar Rose is and does to a single sentence, so here we go…
“Polar Rose detects and matches the faces in your photos automatically – so you can easily name and share with the people that appear in your photos.”
We're still working on it – take the tour!
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What are all these photos in my “All photos…” page?
These are the photos added by all of the people you're following on Polar Rose. If you have Facebook friends that are also using Polar Rose, then they are automatically added to the people you follow and their photos are added to your “All photos…” page.
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What other questions have “go to your settings page” as an answer?
How do I change my name/email address?
How do I turn of all the messages you send me about activity on my account?
How can I be informed about activity on my account via email instead of Facebook.
Other people have a cool background picture, how do I get one of my own?
I chose not to add my Flickr photos when I signed up, how do I add them now?
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How does Polar Rose deal with my private photos
Photos that are set as ‘Private – Your Friends’ or ‘Private – Your Family’ on Flickr are viewable only by your friends on Polar Rose. The same will soon be true for our other photo source partner, 23, but for the moment we only take photos set as public there.
You can of course also choose not to import your private photos to Polar Rose at all via the photo sources page
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What if I don't want certain photos of myself to appear on Polar Rose?
We've all been there. A late evening, one beer too many, a hat that went out of fashion a decade ago and a cute guy/girl with a camera and voila! Your online reputation tarnished for life!
Well, not if you just click “Edit tags” (hover over the offending photo and you'll see it appear) and remove your name from the photo. Reputation saved!
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Why do I get first names for some faces and full names for other faces in the photo notes on my Flickr and 23 photos?
The photo notes are pushed out according to Polar Rose's privacy mechanism. The default setting for how Polar Rose should show your name to people who are not in your friend network is firstname-only (see settings). Since many Flickr and 23 photos are public on the respective websites, we have chosen to treat photos there according to the above.
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Who can remove names from photos?
The person who originally uploaded the photo (the owner), the person who did the naming (the namer) and the named person in question (the namee).
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Strange faces show up after I name somebody – what's that all about?
After you have named a face, you'll be shown faces that look like the one you just named. This helps you to quickly name the same person in other photos they appear in – we call them “matches”.
Face recognition isn't a perfect science though and sometimes this means we'll show you people you don't know – this is because to our software the faces look like a match.
By clicking on these incorrect matches you can tell us that it wasn't the person you just named. A big red cross will appear over the face, to make this clear.
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I never gave you my email address – why is it appearing in my settings page?
Could be for several reasons. Somebody might have shared photo that you appeared in with you via email and you signed up to Polar Rose using the link in that email. The same would happen if you had photos shared with you via email and you already had a Polar Rose account.
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What's with the registering of email addresses associated with my account on my settings page?
If someone is following you on Polar Rose, any photo of you they name automatically gets added to your photo stream. This is because the photo is tagged with a link to your account, not just with the letters that make up your name.
People who are not following you however, don't have this option and are asked to provide an email address for you, so the photo can be shared with you.
If that email address is already registered with us, you won't get a mail telling you that you've been named – instead the photo will immediately be added to your photo stream.
We won't show these email addresses to anyone and we won't spam you – ever! Their only function is to actually reduce the amount of email we send you.
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So you're a scary bad company that is gathering email addresses?
No, but we would be if we were to give them to anyone else or if we used them to send you spam – but we're not, ever, period.
The reason for doing this is purely to provide a better service (and less email) for you. We want to be open about what kind of data we are collecting. We're not doing anything different from most other web services available today – we're just being more transparent about it.
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My online photos are somewhere other than Flickr or 23 – how do I get them onto Polar Rose?
Polar Rose will soon support other photo sharing sites. You might want to drop us a line through Get Satisfaction asking for the particular site you use. That might help us in deciding which ones to add next.
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My mother is on Facebook, so I am not – now what do I do?
We're hoping to offer other sign in methods in the future, like using your Google or Yahoo account instead. Over at Get Satisfaction you can let us know which identity provider you would prefer us to offer next.
We might even go all retro and offer a sign up based on an email address that you have to confirm and a password you have to type twice and a captcha so you can prove that you are a human being! Then again, we might not.
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People keep naming me in photos using Polar Rose but I don't want to be!
This is the bit where you normally would be told that “This is the internet dude!” and that anybody can do anything they want, and that there is nothing you can do about it – however, in this case there are several things you can do…
Firstly, if you do not sign up for Polar Rose, your name will always remain private. That means only the person who named you and any of your other friends from Facebook who are on Polar Rose can see your full name. The world at large (and Google) will be none the wiser.
Secondly, if you still don't want to sign up for Polar Rose and you know the person who named you, you could ask them to remove your name – you can't force them to do it but friends do stuff for friends right? Especially if it only takes a few seconds and a couple of clicks to do.
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What will happen to the old Polar Rose website and browser plugin?
Our old beta site still exists at search.polarrose.com. You can still go there and log in to your old account (if you have one) and use the old features of the old site. Note the continued use of the word “old”. The old site will no longer be updated or actively supported, but we'll keep it online in recognition of the fact that our beta users spent considerable time building up their image collections there.
The data collected using the plugin has been vital in perfecting our face recognition and matching technology and we are immensely grateful for the effort and energy that our beta users have made. We welcome them to the new and better Polar Rose.
The old plugin that was previously available from the old site, is old and has been disabled.
Didn't find the answer to your question?
Over at Get Satisfaction you can ask employees and other Polar Rose users for help – go there now!