In
a previous
post I recommended Flickr for organising and sharing collections
of Interface Designs, and described how to create such a collection using Snagit
with the Flickr
extension to capture screen designs and send directly to Flickr.
Browsing
these large collections in Flickr is not a great experience. With Flickr you either view an image then
click 'back' to select the next image or browse images using the
photostream. Both ways are clunky and a somewhat frustrating
user experience.
So
here's another extension to throw in to the mix which provides a slick
interface to browse images, creating an all-round good experience for viewing an
image collection on Flickr. Welcome Piclens.
Piclens
is a free browser extension that interacts with Flickr to provide a full-screen
interactive 3D wall of images. This is
a browser add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer (PC and Mac) as well as for
Safari (been around on Safari for about a year now). Piclens offers a powerful and
fast way to browse a wall of images.
Image: Piclens 3D wall (below)
Image: Piclens thumbnail viewer (below)
Piclens
supports a number of image sharing applications such as Flickr, Photobucket,
Facebook and many more.
It's
so easy to use. Simply install it and
then mouse over an image to see the Piclens icon. Click the Piclens icon to
enter the full-screen interactive wall.
I recommend you install it but if you need more convincing then check
out Piclens
on YouTube.
There
are some drawbacks such as you can't save images directly from Piclens or view
comments, and the image quality isn't great as Piclens appears to import the
regular sized ‘display’ images as opposed to the largest size images you’ve
uploaded. Despite these drawbacks
Piclens does improve the online image browsing experience enormously and
hopefully the chaps at Cooliris will
address these flaws. By all account they are
very fast to respond to customer feedback and enhance Piclens so I for one am
looking forward to the next release.
So
once you've installed Piclens you can enjoy creating and browsing collections of interface
designs such as: -
Listening
to: Epilogue
in Waves by Bitcrush