A fresh view on photos with PicLens
16 03 2008
Today I want to introduce you to PicLens, a visually impressive browser extension for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, which has completely changed the way that I browse through photos on the internet. If you are browsing a PicLens enabled site, one click will launch the add-on, and its signature wall of photos will fill your screen with all of the pictures on the page.
From there you can easily browse though thumbnails to view images. If you want a better view of an image, a click will enlarge it and center it in your view. Another click will replace it in the wall. This makes it easy to find the perfect image without the hassle of constantly changing pages to view more pictures.
If the search you tried didn’t get you the results you wanted, then you can try again without even exiting PicLens, by using its built in search feature which supports Google Images, Yahoo Images, SmugMug, Flickr, Photobucket, and Deviant Art. Many other websites are also PicLens enabled, including social networking sites Myspace and Facebook and popular image searches Ask Images, Live Images, and AOL Images.
There is also the other side of PicLens, the slideshow viewer. PicLens can take all of the photos that are on the wall and view them as a full screen slideshow. This feature is great if you are browsing high resolution photos, but I didn’t find it as cool as viewing pictures on the wall. The gallery I made while using PicLens is located here.
Cooliris, the PicLens developer, has also developed a lightweight, no install required version of PicLens called PicLens Lite. PicLens Lite allows site designers to enable full screen slideshows to impress visitors with that are nearly identical to the ones in PicLens but without the wall view feature. Cooliris has even released PicLens Publisher, which makes it easy to embed the necessary Media RSS feed and picture files into your site to make PicLens or PicLens Lite work.
The only key feature that I see that is missing in PicLens right now is a save feature which the developer says that it is addressing. Cooliris stated on their website that PicLens has a number of new features coming including a save feature and the ability to use PicLens to view pictures on your computer. As for the features of the different versions, Firefox and Internet Explorer are the same and have been updated the most recently. Safari is still waiting for the 3D wall and search features, but it does allow you to surf through photos with an Apple Remote.
I also downloaded the PicLens Publisher tool to see if I could make PicLens work on a site of my own, and it really simplified the process of generating everything that you needed to enable PicLens and PicLens Lite. However I did find that while it is possible to do some more advanced tricks such as integrating music and video, you have to do this the old-fashioned way: typing with a text editor. You can try out PicLens or PicLens Lite with the gallery that I created here.
PicLens is already a great way to view photos, and with more features on the way like saving and browsing your own pictures, I can’t see any reason not to be using this great add-on. I strongly encourage you to check out PicLens because it truly is fresh tech.
nice review. i agree that pic lens is a dramatic leap forward in the way we view images online. it gives us a taste of the more dynamic and interactive browsers we’ll be using someday soon.
I love the view thanks for the info