Last year we introduced PicLens as a plug-in for Safari that allowed you to view full screen slideshows of photo galleries and images in a slick interface that nicely integrated with the browsing experience. Since then, support for both Firefox and IE browsers on both Windows and Mac have been added allowing the rest of the world to give this plug-in a try.

For those who haven't heard of it, PicLens supports Google, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Yahoo and a few other image services, making it a nice plug-in if you flip through photos and images on a regular basis, or just want to show off a gallery without downloading it. The slideshow expands to full screen, allowing you to enjoy all that screen real estate you gained with that 30" monitor this Christmas.

Thanks, Fitch!

Google has rolled out a new "Images Version" view or Google News. There are buttons on the left side of the page for "Standard Version," "Text Version," and "Images Version." Click on images, and you'll see photos from the day's top stories. If you conduct a search, you'll get images for the top search results.

When you scroll your mouse over each image, a synopsis of the story will appear on the right. You can click either the synopsis or the image to go to the source. But a video's worth a thousand descriptive words, so why don't you just take a look for yourself?

[via Google Operating System]

Google Image Ripper is a nifty little Google hack that lets you search for Google Images without surfing through an endless sea of thumbnails.

All you have to do is enter a search term, an image size (icon, small, medium, large, xlarge, or xxlarge), and hit the rip button. The program searches for images that meet your specifications, and loads all the images onto one screen.

Of course, if you're looking for Creative Commons photos that you can reuse, you're still better off searching Flickr. But if you just need to see a ton of pictures of Angelina Jolie or Jeff Raikes, this might be the tool for you.

[via Boing Boing]

Google has gone and added three major updates to Picasa Web Albums. First, any photos you upload to a blog using Blogger will automatically be added to your personal web album. This sort of integration makes a lot of sense, making it much easier to search for and find photos you've previously used on your blog. Of course, Google could have just included an image search feature in the "search this blog" box on blogger.

The other announcements are probably much bigger news for anyone who doesn't use Blogger. The storage capacity for web albums has been bumped up to 1GB. And while yesterday, you could only search for images in your own web album. Today, you can do a "community search," allowing you to search for images across all web albums. It'll be interesting to see if Google eventually ads these images to Google Images search results.

If you'd rather not share your photos with the whole world, you can set your web albums to "unlisted." Not might be a good time to go do that if you weren't aware that your baby photos were suddenly going to be made available to the whole world. Might have been nice if Google had sent out an email to give users a heads up.

Does this mean Google's trying to take on Flickr? It's too early to say. On the one hand, you can easily search for images and view users shared galleries. On the other hand, Picasa Web Albums don't allow users to assign Creative Commons licenses to their images. That means if you're looking for images you can use and/or edit, you're still probably better off searching Flickr.

A few weeks ago Google went and changed its design for Google images by cleaning up all that annoying extra data on the screen that you don't need, like the image size and the website where it's located. You could still see that information, but only by scrolling your mouse over the image.

Generally, this made Google Images much less useful. If there are multiple versions of the same image available, it's nice to know which one is the largest at a glance, for example. Or if you're looking for images of a rock band, you might want to know which ones come from the band's official web site.

Now, less than a month after rolling out its site redesign, it looks like Google's reverted back to the older, more informative version of Google images. It's nice to see Google reacting to negative response from users, if in fact that's what they're doing. It's always possible this is just a glitch, or that a new interface could be on its way next week.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Sick of the new "better" Google Image search yet? Recent needless-meddling improvements have irritated some users of Google's Image system. Here's a note for Google's UI team: If you're thinking about "fixing" something else this week, maybe you should wander to the cafeteria for some free fois gras instead.

Fret not disenfranchised Google user, there's a solution. Better still, it's easier than you'd think. Google Operating System writes, "I've heard that many people hate the new design of Google Image Search and want the old one back. It's pretty easy to do that, as Google shows the classic design if you disable JavaScript."

Followed by a simple explanation of how to disable Javascript for just images.google.com, it's the easiest fix for a botched user interface ever. I'm a heavy user of Google Images who noticed immediately that one of my most useful tools had undergone an Ajax-y nightmare makeover so, color me ecstatic.

[Via Lifehacker]

My friend Ty pointed out to me today that Google has changed the interface of Google Images, and not necessarily for the better. While the old results display for Google Images searches showed a thumbnail of each image along with the host's domain name, the image's dimensions, and a short description (taken from the image's context on the site). Now Google Images only shows the short description unless you move your mouse over one of the thumbnails. For me, this makes the service significantly less intuitive. If I'm looking for, say, a logo that's a certain size, I want to be able to see each image's dimensions at a glance, but with the new interface I have to roll my mouse over each and every one until I find one that's the right size. Similarly, being able to see the hosts of all of the images was handy, especially if you noticed that many of them are served by the same host. But now it's like a puzzle, moving your mouse around until you find what you're looking for.

I'm not sure if this new interface is showing up for all users, as Google is in the habit of testing new interfaces on a small cross section of users, but either way I hope this is an interface change they reconsider. What do you think of the update?

Want to help Google beef up its images index? Want to kind of have some fun in the process? Google Image Labeler is a new pseudo-game from Google designed to add meaningful keywords to the millions of images in its index while keeping you kind of entertained. It works like this: When you start the game you're assigned a random partner. Then you and your partner are shown the same random image, for which you must enter keywords. So, if it shows you a picture of a dog, you could enter dog, pet, terrier, etc. For every keyword you enter that matches a keyword your partner entered, you get 100 points. As soon as you and your partner enter a match, you go on to the next level, and you play until the two minute timer runs out. When the game is done, you're ranked against other players. So far I haven't been able to break the top 100--success seems to depend a lot on how good your partner is (or to what degree they think like you) and how good the images you get are. Some of the images in the game are pretty challenging to identify, and "mysterious industrial structure" doesn't make a very good keyword.

It's easy to see how this benefit's Google's index: If two randomly-selected people happen to enter the same keyword for the same image, it's a pretty good bet that it's an accurate keyword for that image. This is a pretty smooth move on Google's part, harnessing the brainpower of bored Google fans to do what computers can't currently do well--glean meaningful data from images. If Google can get--and keep--enough people playing the game, it could really strengthen their image search offering.

[Via Google Blogscoped]

Google Images' interface is a lot like most of Google's products: It doesn't stick a lot of options in your face and it stays out of your way. That's a good thing, but once in awhile you want something a little more robust, and that's what Imagery is for. Created last year by Eliazar Cardenas, Imagery is a slick front-end for Google Images that adds a pile of features. Search results are displayed as thumbnails, not unlike the standard Google Images interface, but when you roll over an image a few of options pop up, including Open Source Page and Open in New Window, and an X button the hide that thumbnail entirely. When you left-click on a thumbnail a full-sized version is added to a sort of collection area below where you have more viewing options. Imagery's nicest feature, though, is its tabbed interface. If you've already got one set of search results open and search for a new set of keywords, the new search will be opened in an embedded tab. Though I'm not sure it'll replace the regular Google Images for my daily image-searching needs, Imagery might come in handy for more serious image-hunting.