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

The second best podcast in the world...

...is now no longer available as a podcast :-( but the BBCs 'Now Show' remains available on Listen Again. One can only assume that the 'podcast trial' wasn't judged a success.

I really hope this isn't an indicator for the world's best podcast: Kermode.

tags: podcast, now show, BBC, best

Photomapdragon

Given my interest in maps and photos you'll not be too surprised at this link to Cade Metz in the register postulating on what might happen if you could meld PhotoSynth and Seadragon with online 3D mapping...

...if you have any kind of interest in imaging and handling large amounts of data go watch the video from TED (oh, and there's a nice bonus for flickr fans too).

 

tags: photosynth, photography, imaging, flickr

Web Application

"We're going to see more and more breakthroughs like photosynth that don't look like web applications but nonetheless draw from the same deep trends."

said Tim O'Reilly

tags: photography, photosynth

Britain's Buildings in Photo's

The BBC has a project to build a gallery of photo's of Britain's buildings. The project page includes a section of Photosynth collections that currently includes Ely Cathedral; Burghley House; Bath's Royal Crescent; the ballroom at Blackpool Tower; the Parliament Building in Edinburgh and Trafalgar Square. It struck me that I've only visited two of those, something to add to the todo list for when we go home :-)

tags: photosynth, BBC, photography