PicLens = Image browsing made easy

I don't know how I managed to not know anything about PicLens until today.

PicLens is a browser plug-in which transforms image streams into a full-screen browsing experience. I installed the Firefox extension this morning and I'm in image surfing heaven moments after.

Here's a quick demo on YouTube before my review:



I have been on Flickr for a while now and have accumulated a lot of contacts over time. All of my non-friend contacts on Flickr are folks that I have made a decisive choice to maintain contact because I respect their photographic creation. 1000+ sounds like a lot, but when you consider that more than 24 million people are active on Flickr everyday, a thousand is actually quite a small amount.

While my intention is to be amazed by my colleagues' work, the paging mechanism + thumbnail clicking has also become rather annoying overtime. I tried using the Slideshow module to go through my contacts' photos, but the 200 count limit imposed by Flickr still create some problem.

PicLens does not impose image count limit to any browsing. The browsing model is also so fluid, transparent and intuitive that require zero learning-curve.

With this tool, I did something I have never done on Flickr today:
1. I browsed through every single image posted to my contacts' recent photos.
2. I browsed through the entire photostream from a contact I recently added.

There is no way I could have tolerated this process if I were to do this in Flickr's native interface. It has also replaces the need for flickrleech now, which I must say have served me quite well before PicLens.

But PicLens does not only do Flickr, it also does Facebook, YouTube, Google Image Search, Yahoo Image Search, and the list goes on... I tested it on Google Image Search and had the first tolerable experience on Google Image Search today.

This tool is indispensible. Highly recommended!

Related SML Universe
+ SML Del.icio.us: Flickr + Tools
+ SML Tools
+ SML Wiki: PicLens

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©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe