Rourke McNamara

PicLens is a plug-in for Safari and Firefox that adds full screen slideshows to a variety of popular online photo sharing sites. This is a great idea. The problem is, it doesn’t work very well.

I installed the plugin and went straight to the photo sharing site that most of my friends use, Smugmug. Piclens doesn’t work with Smugmug because they only support a list of six specific sites or any website using auto-discoverable Media RSS feeds. I couldn’t find any photo sharing site or software package using Media RSS, though all of the sites I checked are publishing some form of RSS feeds with image URLs.

Smugmug is currently beta testing the latest version of their photo gallery interface. After playing around on the beta server a little, I’m cautiously optimistic. There are some features that are almost a huge improvement, and some that are a nice step up, and one downsides to the new interface. As is, the new interface is a nice incremental improvement. With a few tweaks it has the potential to be a really impressive step forward.

Techcrunch just posted a story about Pikeo, a new photo sharing service attempting to compete with Flickr and Smugmug. Pikeo is doing a couple of things to set itself apart from Flickr: (1) trying to to capture the non-English speaking market by operating the site in French and Spanish in addition to English, (2) tying your pictures and the photo sharing experience to maps more centrally, and (3) providing a rich client-like interface.