Rourke on Technology

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.

The Smugmug slide show is pretty good anyway, so I went to give Flickr a shot. Piclens worked, but very slowly. Many of the pictures didn’t come up at all, leaving me with a black screen and no visual clue what to do next. The latest iteration of the Flickr slideshow is pretty nice, so the minor improvement that Piclens provided wasn’t worth the wierd bugs.

Facebook has a horrible interface for browsing pictures. Unfortunately, Piclens doesn’t help much here, either. The images look aweful because they’re scaled up from the same images you’re browsing on the Facebook site. Piclens “locked up” my browser a number of times leaving me with a black screen that wouldn’t go away until I hit CTR-ALT-DEL.

My luck viewing the Google and Yahoo image search results with Piclens was very similar to my Facebook experience.

I wish Piclens did work better. My biggest issue with most photo sharing sites is the lack of full screen / black background presentation of images. Photographs deserve to be shown full screen at a high resolution, with nothing to distract from the image.

If you’re interested in reading more, TechCrunch has a positive blurb about Piclens, and Netanel Jacobsson posted a video demo of the plug-in.