PicLens – The Full Screen Image Browser
Published on June 26, 2007 in FirefoxPicLens is a newly released plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser (Windows only), by Cooliris, that lets the user launch a full-screen slideshow while browsing photos on sites such as Flickr. It was first released last year for the Safari browser and can best be described as something similar to the slideshow feature in Picasa. Support for PicLens is currently provided for Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Picasa, and image search results from Google and Yahoo. In addition, web sites can add support for PicLens to their site by including support for Media RSS.
Using PicLens is easy. Once the extension has been installed open a site, such as Flickr, and place the mouse on the bottom left corner of any picture. A translucent ‘Play’ icon will appear. Clicking on this icon causes the PicLens slideshow interface to appear. From there one can move from one photo to the next or press play and enjoy a slide show of all the images show.
PicLens is an impressive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the web. The full screen rendering does require a fairly quick internet speed when displaying large photographs, but the images are visually stunning. The only problem I have experienced with PicLens is that running the Customize Google (see the comment by tidychaos below to for the setting necessary to run this with Customize Google), RealPlayer and/or Firebug extensions with PicLens causes PicLens not to work on certain sites.
I tried this feature out earlier this afternoon while running customize google concurrently with PicLens. I noticed that http://images.google.com does not show the play button on any of the images. To let this feature work, you need to “remove the check mark” from: Tools > CustomizeGoogle Options > Images > Rewrite links to point straight to the images. Removing this check mark will keep CustomizeGoogle from taking control of the images.
tidychaos…
thanks for the tip.
I tried piclens, but all that comes up are single colour images (yes, just one big rectangle, the same colour throughout). The colour that shows up is clearly related to the images, but the actual image does not show up properly. None of the control buttons show up either.
Running Firefox on XP.
ok, once i saw someone having piclens installed on a website, do you guys have the code? i cant find it.
Thanks Claudio