Cooliris is a fantastic browser plugin that displays image galleries on sites like Facebook and Flickr as a wall of photos that you can manipulate by dragging. It's an attractive visual effect, and it's actually a fast and efficient way to get an overview of a gallery and find a specific image. Unfortunately, the Cooliris iPhone app isn't as useful as its browser-based counterpart.

The upside is that Cooliris for iPhone looks just as cool as the web version, and it's more fun to play with. The drag and pinch interface of the iPhone is designed for something like this. Unfortunately, the mobile version of Safari isn't. Because a browser plugin would present some seriously problems for an iPhone developer, Cooliris is a standalone app. Instead of activating it within Facebook or Flickr -- photos you might really care about -- you're limited to its search function. It's a cool toy, but it doesn't feel nearly as essential as the desktop version.

The folks behind the PicLens browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer are on a roll. Earlier this year the company rolled out an improved version that lets you view image slideshows from Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, Photobucket, SmugBug, Photobucket, and DeviantArt as a never-ending wall of pictures. Last month, PicLens added support for YouTube videos. And now PicLens 1.7 adds a whole new "Discover" section that lets you browse images and movies in categories such as:

• US News
• International News
  
• Sports
• Entertainment
• Movies/TV
• Fashion/Lifestyle
• Science/Technology
• Business

The content comes from several sources including MSNBC, ESPN, and movie trailer sites. And the content is constantly changing. You can access the Discover tab just by hitting the PicLens icon in your browser and selecting the Discover button on the left hand side of the screen.

PicLens has also added the ability to search Amazon.com from the main search box. And probably one of the most useful new features is a "Return to PicLens" button that pops up in your browser window any time you follow an image from PicLens back to its original source. This lets you go back to your PicLens session without starting over from scratch.

You know those pretty slideshows that you can view in Flickr? PicLens is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you view images from a bunch of sites as slideshows. When we last looked at PicLens, you could view images from Flickr, Google, Photobucket, SmugMug, DeviantArt, and Yahoo! Now PicLens has added support for YouTube videos.

When you click the PicLens button in your browser, you get a black screen and a search bar. Just type any term in the search bar and you can sift through a wall of YouTube thumbnails. Click a video and it will start playing. You can blow videos up to full screen, or look through more thumbnails while your video is playing. In other words, it's kind of like watching YouTube without the ads.

[via VentureBeat]

We're big fans of Piclens, a web browser plugin that lets you create photo slideshows out of search results from sites like Flickr, Google Images, Photobucket, Facebook, and about a dozen other services. PicLens has come a long way since we first covered it back in 2006. At the time, Piclens was only available for Safari.

A few months ago, Piclens released browser plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer. And this week the service released a new version of its browser plugin that supercharges the full-screen slideshows. You can still browse through images using a Flickr-like slideshow with thumbnails at the bottom of your screen and a larger image in the main window.

But the default image browser is now more like a brick wall, where each brick is an image thumbnail. And the wall goes on forever. You can drag a slider at the bottom of the window and zip past images in a way that sort of defies description, which is why we've embedded a video above. You can also click on individual files for a larger view, search for more images from within the slideshow player, or click a link to see the image at its source.

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!

PicLens is a slideshow plug-in for Safari that adds a full-screen browsing mode for viewing pictures on Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, and Ask.com Images. If you've got a newer Mac which has an Apple Remote, you can use it to advance through photos. It's very slick and unobtrusive, and perfect if you've got your Mac setup as a media center to your television. Never fear, Firefox and Internet Explorer users, they are promising versions for those browsers as well.