PicLens Users: We’re Listening!
July 15th, 2008Here at Cooliris, we believe that two heads are better than one.
When we’re looking for new directions, one of the first places we look isn’t the next cubicle over. It’s you guys. We love hearing your thoughts on the Next Big Thing. And we’re listening.
The folks over at iPernity posted an article about us on their blog a couple of weeks ago, asking their users to request full PicLens integration. The iPernity community pounced on the opportunity, and their response was overwhelming – at its peak, we were getting 30 emails an hour!
We talked to their CTO right away and got the ball rolling. We started getting emails on June 30th; iPernity received full PicLens integration on July 4th, just in time to show off the fireworks.
When you mobilize, so do we. The PicLens & iPernity team effort happened because their community members were all so motivated to get PicLens enabled on their site that they combined their voices – and made sure we really did hear them.
We’re working as fast as we can to implement great new ideas for improved functionality, customizability, and the just plain cool. Over the next few weeks you’ll be seeing some great new features out of PicLens. But we’d like to hear from you on what you think will make the next version of PicLens better.
So take a moment: add a suggestion to this blog post! If someone has mentioned your idea already, back them up! You guys are invaluable, and we want to do everything we can to make sure you’re soaring through the internet.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
- Piclens is not really user-friendly and flexible because you can only search pictures/vids on some famous sites. Therefore you are totally dependent from those sites and have no control about the way you use. I would like to see a option to add individual sites of my choice.
- Second, the discover news is ony for english users. People from other non-english countries won’t have the chance to add/read news based on their language. Therefore this feature is useless for me.
- Third, as some users already reported on addons.mozilla, Piclens does not work on images.google when customizegoogle is installed and the option Rewrite links to point straight to the images is checked.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Integration with Safari is what I want most for PicLens right now. It’s great to add new features, but doesn’t really help if you’re skipping the basics and cutting off a portion of users.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:14 am
thanks for a great product! have already shared and blogged about it, and installed it on all our three machines
only slightly inconvenience is the interface back to the original picture. maybe a nice little button to save directly to disc?
July 16th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
The problem with piclens is that websites have to go out of there was to support it. If piclens supported the widely already used rss tag enclosure, that is the standard way of including rich media in rss feeds. This would in fact make piclens more like a podcast viewer, making it much more useful.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Best Program i have used so far!!!
but PLEASE PLEASE FIX the video sync problem soon. So i can start watching youtube videos again.
THANK A UNIVERSE GUYS… GREAT WORK!!!
July 17th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Hi there,
Thanks so much for your responses and support.
Believe when I say we’re just getting started. We have loads of new features and supported sites coming.
Regarding sites, PicLens currently support websites and blogs using standard Media RSS feeds. For those interested, our instructions at piclens.com/lite will teach you how to implement feeds on your own site or blog. We’re, of course, also working to enable other larger well-known sites, in addition to the current list (Google Images, YouTube, Amazon, Flickr, Facebook ,etc).
The Discover feature is constantly getting updated. We’re adding more feeds, including many international ones. We also creating a back engine that will serve you news localized to your country. This is all happening now and through the next couple of months. As the majority of our users are non-US users, serving our international feeds is a key priority for us.
PicLens for Safari was our very first beta version. Due to resource constraints, we had to scale back to focusing on Firefox and IE for a while. The good news is that we’re working on a Safari version with the 3D Wall now.
We have a new build coming out in the next week or so that addresses the audio sync issues. We’re still testing it out with beta testers to see if we’ve squashed the bug.
Super thanks, again, everyone. Feel free to tell your friends about PicLens, too. . . . heh, heh, a little sales pitch there!
Kind regards,
Alec & The Cooliris Team
July 18th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Hello Cooliris,
first I want to thank you for this innovative, creative and simply cool piece of software.
The most important feature for me at the moment is the ability to open the links to the website of the picture/video in a tab in the background, because I tend to first search and open all pages that might be of interest to check them later.
Regards
mvol
July 19th, 2008 at 1:02 am
yeah I would like to add my own RSS feeds into it, overall, the app rocks!! thanks!
July 19th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Marvellous product. I think the next direction I would like to see is that you allow sites that support piclens to skin the interface, giving full control of the visual layout - perhaps we’d like 4 rows of images or a vertical layout. I’d like to be able to set the background colour - perhaps we can use texture maps - I’d like sites logo to be more prominent.
Perhaps a new version could allow us to suppress the discover button and limit the search to our own web sites.
keep up the great work.
Steve.
July 23rd, 2008 at 6:44 am
I like the idea of PicLens a lot and I see a defenite use for it. But here’s a question that pops up immediately. If somebody were to browse my website in PicLens they would hit the discover button for sure. The moment they do that, they’re gone from my site. Is there a way to use PicLens only within a website, without the discover button? I love the system but I don’t want to lose any viewers just because of the discover button. I can’t find a ‘back’ button either, so once they’re gone they can’t come back.
Curious to hear what you think, thanks
Bas
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:45 am
I was wondering if there was any way to integrate Piclens with Firefox’s search engine and/or search keyword features. For example, if I wanted to search for pictures of birds in Google Images with Piclens, I’d type gimagep birds in the location bar. If you wanted to go as far as to integrate this into Safari as well, perhaps you could try communicating with the folks who develop Keywurl (http://purefiction.net/keywurl/).
July 24th, 2008 at 12:54 am
Glad to hear that PicLens is coming back to Safari; it was the best plugin available and has been sorely missed.
I’m hoping the new release will work with the Version 4 Developer Preview.
July 24th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Hi there,
would be great if you implement an option to choose the time between two photos in slideshow-mode. I think the standard time is about 2 seconds and thats way too short for watching intensivly.
In case this is already available, please tell me where I can find this option.
Greetings
Daniel
July 24th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
This may be a pipe dream, but a Linux version would be excellent! That is where I usually use Firefox, and would be awesome…!
Also, how about viewing local files? I saw that little “workaround” posted in the FAQ, but you guys mentioned it wasn’t optimized… and that is definitely right. It is amazingly slow, which is surprising because it doesn’t have to download any of the pictures or some cases any thumbnails either, so it should be lightening fast… but it’s not. I have thousands of pictures on my hard drive, it would be awesome if PicLens would be able to view them locally without putting them all up on Flickr or something!
Thank you so much for this product though, I recommend it and add it to people’s internet Firefox and IE browsers all the time!
July 27th, 2008 at 2:34 am
I think your interface is amazing. Browsing FlickR photostreams and search results through PicLens is a joy.
The thing I most wish PicLens did was allow for you to use it as a Media RSS reader. I have tonnes of RSS feeds I subscribe to from FlickR. It’s painful reading these through Google Reader because it treats each photo as a separate post.
Being able to subscribe to Media RSS feeds is the only amazing feature you get in the Flock browser that you can’t implement yourself (and usually more powerfully) through Firefox with add-ons - and it’s a feature I’d love to have because I don’t want to ditch Firefox for Flock.
So, I really recommend you think of adding that feature.
July 27th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Great addon!
I agree with Anon: Viewing locally stored fotos works great (with workaround by pointing browser to local drive) but performance (and caching) needs to be increased and enhanced.
Thanks a lot in advance!
July 29th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Hey, guys! Hi all! I just want to know if you’re plannig to have a PicLens Linux version. We really miss it… Anyways, congratulations for the nice job!
July 29th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
It would be nice to use the already super great Piclens on any website with RSS.
Also it would be nice to browse my own photos and videos in PicLens!!
Thanks for your hard work, and I have turned like 4-5+ people onto your plug-in. The recent updates are so amazing and cheers on the Discovery Mode!!
Looking forward to future updates!
July 30th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
From what I have seen so far, this is one of the best ideas yet. I will be sure to use this everyday. It makes my job, and surfing experience much easier to handle. This system is so easy to work with. Again thanks to all of those who made this possable.
August 2nd, 2008 at 11:41 am
Great application, and an impressive display. Thank you.
One thing I’ve noticed with my WinXP/Firefox3 is the Cursor becomes a smaller white arrow, which tends to disappear off the PictureWall, making it hard to select other items. No one else mentioned it, so maybe it’s me — but in case …
Cheers,
Phil.
August 3rd, 2008 at 5:35 am
Please let me choose the duration between two pictures in slide-show mode.
Also, I’d like piclens not to dim (darken) the current image when the next one is loading.
August 3rd, 2008 at 5:53 am
Piclens should be usable for those who use the Opera browser
August 4th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Hi Guys, I really like your product.
Would also just like to request for an option to open links in the background without closing piclens.
August 8th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Just to support the requests for Piclens to work with local files on my hard drive. Be a great way to scroll through my own photos, and great for displaying too!
August 12th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Flock 2 support, please! PicLens is the only extension not working w/Flock 2 (that I care about) and it’s forcing me to keep Firefox 3 installed. I’m jumping back and forth between browsers… they’re both Firefox 3 under the hood. 1.8 Beta installs fine, I added the wall to my toolbar, I click it, nothing happens.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:52 am
[apologies for cross posting]
Wonderful app, but as some blogs have noticed, doesn’t work well enough on facebook. Some people have complained that it only doesn’t work on the new FB, but it had similar problems on the old facebook too, namely, you could not browse all of a person’s pictures from within piclens itself. After you finished the current page of pics in FB, you’d have to quit piclens, hit “next” in FB, then click the piclens again.
More strangely, there is an addition step which is to also click “reload” in the browser: otherwise, piclens taps right back into the media rss for the previous page of pictures. I have no clue why this happens, but it’s annoying enough to just stop using piclens in FB. This problem doesn’t show up when browsing google images: you can browse hundreds of images without going back to the actual webpage and hitting “next”…
There must be thousands of users running into this same problem, so I was surprised to not find it documented in detail on the Known Issues page. I’m guessing FB is the true culprit, but I was wondering when I might hope for a fully functional piclens.
thanks!
August 15th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Cooliris (PicLens) is the second best thing, that could happen to the WorldWideWeb, after Firefox. But I still miss these Points of funktionality:
-I feel the discovery-sidebar, really, really should be expandet to a bookmarks toolbar, where I can delete entries, or ad new ones (e.g. Im not at all interestet in Sports, so I dont want to see the Sports entrys everytime i open the sidebar!!!).
- I think you should be able to make a choice between 3, 4, and 5 Pictures in a colum.
-When you share media, it should only be sent via email, when the receipient is not registred at Coliris, if so, he should just see a new entry in the sidebar under a title like “new recomendations from UserXY”.
-When you play a video, it should only stop playing, when you start playing a new one or when you press stop, because it often is great to listen to the sound of a video playing on youtube, while you browse for the next one to watch. Now it stops playing when you deselect it, wich is odd.
-If a browser page does not support cooliris, why not just display all jpg’s greater than 10KB, which are embedded in the html?
-Make it possible to give options to sort the results shown in the PictureWall.
-Right-Click Menu to give options like Sace Picture or Video to desk or to Favorites-Bar (See above)
-If it works in internet explorer, why not make it possible to add it to your Windows explorer? Maybe release an SDK so that folks out there can do that for you?
-When you browse to a page with more than 1 Stream (eg. Youtube : 1. Most Favorite, 2. Most Recent, 3. My Favorites, when logged in), then first show A Stack-Folder for each Stream giving a preview of the Pictures (Like the Folders shown in Win*MediaPlayer11 wehn browsing a Pictures Folder), which you then could expand to the whole picture wall.
-Make a playlist sidebar on the right hand side, where you could store the videos to be watched, or pictures that interest you. Maybe then batch download them or save them as a new stream-object.
Thanks for your attention!
jj
August 16th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
please enable local folder browser !!!
August 21st, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Yes, please re-enable the local folder support. This would ensure PicLens becoming a permanent add-on to my browser.
August 23rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Piclens older version was better than Cooliris cause the new one doesn’t work with facebook as it says that facebook is under the list of supported sites but doen’t seem to work.
I hope it can get fixed.
thx
August 25th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Hi!
First thanks for your great program, impressive.
2 problems for me:
- since i installed CoolIris 1.8 in replacement of Piclens 1.6, images shown on the wall for a Google Image search are limited to the first page or results ; while in the previous version, all the results (thousands) were shown on the wall –> big problem! Same pbl with Yahoo Image and everything.
- It never worked with Facebook for me : is it normal ?
I use Firefox 3 and Win XP SP2.
Thanks for your help!
August 31st, 2008 at 8:06 am
ive downloaded your product and managed to use it once, for the time i did use it , it was pretty amazing. Im using ie8 beta 2, is that the problem?? i click on the icon in the pictures, and in the tab, it dos’ent work. The funny thing is , is
August 31st, 2008 at 8:10 am
srry last comment fell short. As i was saying, the funny thing is that i downloded this off of the ie8 beta webpage. anyone know how to solve this? or should i wait tell ie8 is 100% complete and compatible?
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:48 pm
To me, THE MOST IMPORTANT feature to implement would be the ability to open picks in the background, without leaving the cooliris screen. An absolute must-have to really enjoy the cooliris experience, IMO (and like John Lennon said, “I´m not the only one…”
Thanks guys
September 11th, 2008 at 3:03 am
Piclens is so great ….
but i want used piclens without send…….
how can make that?
sorry my english is not so perfect
September 25th, 2008 at 4:39 am
I have added Piclens to my site but found one issue. I have added some RSS feeds into the head of my pages using <link rel=”alternate”… but of course Piclens requires the same code, to add its RSS feed to the page. Is there any way to add the Piclens RSS feed but stop Google from including it in rss button in the nav bar? I need this because the Piclens RSS feed is quite different in format to my others and is not compatible with all RSS readers.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:05 pm
I also think his would be a great way to scan pictures on the hard drive. The wall concept is great. I think you could also cook up a clever way make the wall move 2 dimensionally (I know it looks 3D already, but only moves in one dimension)
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Great FF Add-on.
Some requests:
*Bring back ‘Local File Viewing’ (even if it has problems caching non-pre-thumbnailed images)
*Add support for more video format (h264, divx/xvid, mpeg…..)
*Add configuration/button-mapping (UI simplicity is golden, but it’s mostly ‘PowerUsers!’ using this, let us make it better, don’t be so Apple-rogant)
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Another vote for local folder browsing *please*! I’d even be keen on the *Launch Cooliris* icon in the windows explorer as you have with firefox.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Does not work properly with facebook. Please make it so you can view all of a person’s photos from one wall. Thank you.