Slide shows on the web

There's been a lot of Microsoft goodness that I've pointed to recently so it's nice to be able to point and something from another part of the ecosystem.

One of the struggles of working with photos on the web is balancing different use cases: small pictures for fast download on slow connections; higher resolution for larger displays or printing; gallery views and full screen slide shows. We're fussy customers aren't we?

PicLens (via techcrunch) is a plugin for Firefox and Safari browsers that understands popular photo sites and provides a slide show view of the content auto-magically. PicLens lets viewers click on an image which then expands to a full screen viewer (using the knowledge of the photo site to grab higher resolution content on-the-fly). Once full screen, you can browse related images, or drop into a slide show mode. You can also support PicLens on any site by publishing a Media RSS feed.

It's not a perfect solution — there's a number of things I'd like to enable in this scenario, including some nice twists with more intelligent file formats — but it is an interesting step nonetheless.

tags: photography, piclens