PicLens plug-in for Firefox

I spend a lot of time looking at photos online: mostly in Flickr and Facebook. I spend so much time doing this that I have been bitter for a long time about the annoyingness of the interfaces. You have to page through little thumbnails, and if you want to look at a bigger picture you have to click and then wait. I’m not the only one annoyed by this because people have used the Flickr API, in particular, to create tools to get around it (see a comprehensive list at The Great Flickr Tools Collection). For the Mac in particular I have used Flickr Finder (free) and Photonic ($25). Both are an improvement over the Flickr Web interface, but they have serious drawbacks. Flickr Finder, for me, wasn’t all that intuitive for browsing, so I ended up rarely using it; Photonic is really impressive, but after any duration of use I noticed that the photos, well, flicker when they are loading. I felt the onset of epilepsy looming. Plus, those two tools, although worthy, did not conquer the Facebook problem, and that is significant because now a majority of my personal friends post their photos to Facebook rather than Flickr.

Enter PicLens (subtitle: “Immersive Views Across the Web”). PicLens is an add-on for Firefox, IE, and Safari and does work with the new Firefox 3. It works with Windows and Mac, but I see no love for Linux as of yet. I was going to make a cool screencast, but there’s already one on the PicLens Web site here. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the currently supported sites. They include Flickr, Facebook, Google image search, and YouTube, and those seem to be the big three, at least in the World According to Me.

PicLens finally allows me to easily browse photo pools and sets easily and within my browser so I don’t have to mess with external software. There are several viewing options, and if you don’t like one I suggest playing around with them. The super cool-looking 3D bouncy wall caused me to become vomitose with motion sickness, for example. I’m loving this plug-in and hope more Web sites start enabling it. And did I mention it’s free? Go get some PicLens love and enter the war against paging!