Design Inspiration Using PicLens 1.6
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve been blown away by an application for the Internet but yesterday I was. I got an email from a fellow designer (thanks Aoife) to a cool application that works for Internet Explorer, Firefox (pc and mac), and Safari. The application is PicLens and in a nutshell, it’s an image gallery viewing tool that sits above your browser (in full screen when open) and makes life much easier than traditional thumbnail listing, click for larger image, next page, etc.
If you’ve ever tried navigating a photo gallery on somebody’s bebo, myspace or facebook page, you’ll know what a headache it can be. With this application installed, you click an icon on supported images and it loads all the images into a cool interface that shows all the images on a “virtual wall” that you can skip along quickly, zoom in, zoom out, start a slideshow, and more. It’s hard to describe how it works but the best thing I can suggest is to just try it. For Mac users our there, it’s like looking at images in cover view.
My First Implementation
Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall
This got me thinking about the application of such a tool into my every day life and I’ve come up with my first implementation. I subscribe to css galleries to keep a fresh of new techniques and designs. I put the collection into a little web app for my viewing pleasure. However, it’s not that easy to browse and find what I’m looking for so I decided to integrate PicLens into it. I’ve come up with a cool Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall that I can quickly flick through, find a site I like and open it directly all from within PicLens. You can try it out for yourself but make sure you are using FireFox and have the PicLens extension installed as I haven’t configured it for IE or Safari yet. I’ve got a number of ideas floating around for this in my head but I imagine any site I create in the future that has a photo gallery will have support for PicLens or similar apps. I can’t see me ever browsing a gallery using standard pages if I can use PicLens instead.
Using PicLens for Web/Stock Image Searches
There’s a built in search facility that allows you to search for images on Google, Yahoo, Flickr and DevianArt. The results show up in the app and when you find a pic you like, you can click a button (top left) and it will bring to the page it is from. Way cool! We were chatting on Irish Webmaster Forum about the app and James came up with a great use of the app. I, and a lot of other designers, love iStockPhoto for images for our websites. It can be very annoying and time consuming trying to find the right image so instead of using iStockPhoto’s built in search, you can use PicLens to search Google Images for “site:istockphoto.com business” and you’ll get business related results. You can quickly browse them and open the iStockPhoto page that has the image for sale. I’m sure this same technique could be used on countless other websites too.
Well, that’s it for now. Hope you like the app and let me know what you think with a comment below. Any other good uses of this tool you can think of? Tricks? etc? To finish… Here’s a few screenshots of PicLens on my Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall. 2 thumbs up to the guys at who created it! Superb! 
Screenshots
