I checked out the PicLens, Firefox plug-in last week and WOW! It’s waaaaay cool! Basically it turns Google Images, Flickr, Photobucket or a few other photo sites into really cool, full-screen interactive galleries. Here is my review:

Pros:

• The resolution/quality is amazing. They must have some sort of filter that sharpens the images because even small images look quite crisp blown up.
• You can quickly scan through hundreds of photos just by dragging along the scroll bar
• Very cool eye candy

Cons:

• It’s just eye candy. I was very surprised to find that once you are in PicLens, there is no way to link straight to a given photo on the site it appears on. Or at least if there is, I haven’t been able to find it in 1 week of using it quite frequently.

  For example, I was sketching a moose for an illustration and used piclens to browse Google images for moose pictures. Once I found one I liked I wanted to jump to that actual site to see if they had any others. No can do! I’ve sent this suggestion to PicLens so hopefully it is something they can add in a later version. Until then this is cool eye candy with no real use.

3-27-08 - Update: So I did end up finding out how to jump straight to the images you are browsing in PicLens. Ike Yospe reminded me that I hadn’t updated my blog about that so here goes… There is a tiny arrow up at the top left (next to the logo for the site you are browsing) that when clicked will take you to the page the image is on. BOOOOOO PicLens! This was obviously an afterthought and just thrown in without much care of whether anyone ever finds it. It’s quite disappointing considering how amazingly intuitive the rest of the app is. How about a simple text link that says “view this image online” or something to that effect. Heck put it in the same spot as the arrow, I don’t care. But make it noticeable. Otherwise PicLens remains in my opinion eye-candy and nothing else…