Image browsing gets really cool

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

Hundreds if not thousands of applications have been turned loose that attempted to wrap complex or simply large data sets in some kind of sophisticated visual interface. The majority of these have been failures either because they were simplistic and didn't add much value or they required far more resources to render their presentations than the average user had.

In today's newsletter I have a Web-related product that is a significant step beyond previous display tools and thereby delivers that most valuable of services; a better way of looking at 'stuff' and one that works on most modern PCs.

The tool is Piclens published by Cooliris. Piclens is a browser add-on for Internet Explorer, Safari, and Flock that displays both images and video.

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Hundreds if not thousands of applications have been turned loose that attempted to wrap complex or simply large data sets in some kind of sophisticated visual interface. The majority of these have been failures either because they were simplistic and didn't add much value or they required far more resources to render their presentations than the average user had.

In today's newsletter I have a Web-related product that is a significant step beyond previous display tools and thereby delivers that most valuable of services; a better way of looking at 'stuff' and one that works on most modern PCs.

The tool is Piclens published by Cooliris. Piclens is a browser add-on for Internet Explorer, Safari, and Flock that displays both images and video.

Piclens is launched in two ways. The first is from the icon Piclens adds to the browser menu bar while the second is by clicking on an image or video on a Piclens-enabled Web site (a small start button is displayed on images on the site when you mouse over them).

When launched, Piclens takes over the entire screen and initially brings up a random assortment of images from Flickr. Here’s where you’ll first see the “Wow” factor of Piclens: Piclens displays a “wall” of images that swings in as if the wall is pivoting towards you – it’s all very smooth and very fast.

If you click on an image it will zoom out of the wall to be displayed at a larger scale with the correct perspective on the zoomed out image as the wall turns towards you – way cool! – and there’s a button that will take you out of Piclens and directly to the image on the Web.

In Piclens you can navigate through the entire set of available images using the navigation slider below the display and zoom the display to maximize the image size.

Using the search bar at the top of the display you can enter a search term and select which search engine to use – Amazon, YouTube, Google, Smugmug, Flickr, Photobucket, deviantART, and Yahoo are included.

Piclens also support the display of images on any site that supports Media RSS, which includes all of the sites that are included in searching as well as photo services: Picasa Web, Albums, Fotki, and FotoTime; social networking services including: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster; image search sites: Ask Images, Live Images, and AOL Images and galleries: Freewebs, Lightroom TTG Galleries, and Joomla Phoca Gallery.

Piclens is a very clever piece of engineering – all of the presentation effects you see are generated by code that interacts directly with the hardware and given that this product works cross platform it is an impressive feat.

How Cooliris plans to make money from Piclens isn’t clear yet, and when you see how it works it is obvious that any kind of interstitial advertising would devalue the product considerably. Would I pay for Piclens? Well, that would depend on how much and whether additional features such as being able to build collections, post images to blogs, and annotate images were included. We’ll just have to wait and see …

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.