Piclens 1.6.3 update: A Brilliant Must Have Plug In for Photo and Video Browsing Edit

Web Image Searching - Piclens take image searching to a whole new dimension

Amazing cool 3-D picture viewer add-on for Firefox browser. It works with ...


Trendhunter covered it earlier, but the new Piclens version 1.6.3. is a killer!

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 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!

My first impression:
Wow! Cool! but you can’t link to the photo you like. This omission has been fixed with version 1.6.3 and hence I believe it is ready to become a mainstream plug in.

For my examples here I used the ITB2008 Berlin Travel Blogger Summit Flickr Pool.

Be aware
Today the plug in page of Firefox only offers version 1.6.2 without the tagging and linking possibilities, but I assume that will be corrected soon.

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:

You always should launch Piclens first from your tool bar where it installs itself after downloading. In the Piclens window you then open the Youtube search tool of Piclens which you find at the top.

But then you have something! The result of a search for Piclens demo videos on Youtube. The video in the center starts playing immediately! How beautiful.

The song with the video here is “Technologic” by Daft Punk, also a must have:-)

Further goodies

You can download a tool to make your own site Piclens compatible. I do believe Trendhunter should this today!

There is a Wordpress plug in. Note to self: 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.