The opening Screen
Some time ago I came across Piclens from the company Cool Iris via a recommendation from Internet Guru Doc Searls. Doc has no search function on his Blog. A severe neglect! At first I couldn’t find his post back.
As an aside: He also recommended Flickrfan in a post Less T, More V , but that is for the Mac aficionados. I have no Mac.
Eventually my persistence did find me Doc’s: Nice Plugin.
Another aside is that a commenter to that post advised to have a look at Photo Synth. I didn’t (yet).
What is Piclens?
Piclens is available as a plug in for Firefox and some other browser flavors to view large numbers of pictures on sites like Flickr. It is an amazing quick way of browsing around a lot of photos. Much quicker than Flickr’s slideshow and also much quicker than Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom of Adobe for those who work with it. Brilliant!
The Full Screen
My first impression:
Wow! Cool! but you can’t link to the photo you like. This has been fixed with version 1.6.3 and hence I believe it is ready to become a mainstream plug in.
The Full Screen with one photo in the centre zoomed in
and following you each time you move your mouse
A video wall alike browsing screen
For these examples I used the ITB2008 Berlin Travel Blogger Summit Flickr Pool.
A Screen with one photo zoomed in maximally
Be aware!
Today the plug in page of Firefox only offers version 1.6.2 without the tagging and linking possibilities and not yet version 1.6.3 with the tagging and linking! That you should obtain from the Piclens site.
Piclens now for Youtube!
It took me some time to find out how Piclens would work with Youtube. It is only a small indication somewhat forlorn on the site of Piclens:
The only way to open a Youtube video search
You always should launch Piclens first from your tool bar where it installs itself. In the Piclens screen you then open the Youtube search tool of Piclens which you find at the top of the Piclens screen.
But then you have something!
The result of a Piclens search on Youtube. The video starts playing immediately!
I like this instruction video and its song best
Here is the video itself:
The song is “Technologic” by Daft Punk, also a must have:-)
Further goodies
You can download a tool to make your own site Piclens compatible.
There is a WordPress plug in: A must investigate.
Disadvantage
I see one big disadvantage of Piclens. Flickr Photos are uploaded under various licenses and cannot be copied easily. With Piclens you can make a screen dump and avoid the license protection of Flickr easily.
Rest assured: I am not trespassing copy rights here, because most photo’s I showed you are my own.
Post Alia
Today again Philippe Wolff was talking about the perfect storm he sees in the online travel world. See Kevin’s post at Travolution’s Blog. Well I would say this small plugin will definitely add to that storm!
Thanks for such a detailed review of Piclens. I hadn’t heard of it before and it sounds like an incredibly useful application!
Hi Peter
Most welcome!
I see you are a Travel Blogger as well. It is really helpful with blogging. Just browsing with it.