Full Screen Web Photo Browsing With PicLens
Duncan Riley
36 comments »
Firefox plugin PicLens from Cooliris provides full screen immersive picture browsing of Flickr and other web sites that support Media RSS.
To use PicLens, a user clicks a small translucent icon that appears atop the image of interest once the plugin is installed. The PicLens slideshow interface appears and the user can move from one photo to the next or press play and enjoy the show. A user can intuitively browse images within search results, photo albums, and Media RSS enabled websites.
Support is currently provided for Flickr, Facebook, Friendster, Picasa Web Album and image search results from Google and Yahoo. Site owners can add support to any site with photos by including Media RSS support.
The best way to describe PicLens is that it’s a like the slideshow feature in Picasa or a similar photo viewing tool, but applied to web pages. The full screen rendering does require a decent internet speed when displaying large photographs, but visually the results are stunning. This Firefox plugin is going to find a lot of fans very, very quickly.
(thanks to Ouriel Ohayon for the tip)
cool
Yeah, looks nice. Great UI !! And seems to work smoother than Flickr’s own slide show.
“Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited and the wealth and confusion man has created.”
This is new? Its been available as a Safari plugin for over a year - been a standard in my plugins directory since it first appeared.
It is very very slick, and a great way to explore Flickr. Google/Yahoo results vary, as they index everything - and a 50px gif doesn’t look so hot at full screen!
Happy that the PC folk can now enjoy the tasty PicLens goodness now, too.
Hmm…
Am I the only one having some sort of focus issue when running the plugin? The true full screen, i.e. the view where snapshot menu at the bottom hides, only works for about a second or two before it pops back up again which is rather annoying.
Also it doesn’t work on Google images for me although I guess this is probably one of my other Google extensions messing with it.
Other all a nice extension though, it compliments greased lightbox (a greasemonkey script) well.
Can you not use it as a plug in for FireFox on a Mac?
what is the business model?
I don’t think a business model is even thought about with any of the Photo add ons…
good product, but how will they monetize it (if they want to)?
why would they need to monetise it? not everything is a capitalistic ratrace.
This is a VERY cool plug in, I may never look at flickr without it.
Works especially well if you have a dual monitor setup.
Great Job guys!!!
Slick product, kudos to the Cooliris team, thanks for the link Duncan.
Great product / business model is - weak - if they have one…
- The video is “B Grade” at best -
-RB
uh, michael, have you thought about giving credit to lifehacker.com for discovering this utility (from me actually)? that’s lame…
Does it really need to have a business model around it? It’s just a plug-in fellas!!
I don’t think they expected to make a killing with it, just a cool feature for us fire-fox users.
myplaylist.biz is an example of this feature without the need for a plug in. However apart from the iffy video it looks good.
Johnny 5- and Safari users. Its been on Safari for well over a year.
Thanks for the posting about our new PicLens version for Firefox. We really appreciate it.
The launch of PicLens 1.5 beta for Firefox is the result of positive responses to our earlier Safari version, which also just got upgraded with new features and enabled sites. Enabling site support using Media RSS standard is something we are very excited about, as it makes it easy for webmasters of any site to post full-screen slideshows viewable by online users with PicLens.
Thanks again,
The PicLens Team
The Firefox version only works on Windows. Lame.
Where’s the Mac/Linux versions? One of the biggest advantages of Firefox extensions is that they are cross platform–so why make a Windows only version?
Dave, I did the video and put up the post - Techcrunch picked it up after me - not lifehacker
very cool. anything that gets images distributed in a cool way gets my vote, like prowebsurfer.
Adding another voice to the choir: Firefox plugin is Windows-only!?!??!?!?!
You bought me, I must try it. The idea of being RSS supported is great, and aesthetically is awesome.
A great user interface - I wish it would take photos straight from the hard disk!