I spend a great deal of my time on the internet browsing my friends photos, its one of the primary uses of social networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr. I do sometimes wonder if even this simple function is too painful when having to wade through paging or search function however this is a problem that Danny Thorpe, Ex Chief Compiler Dude at Borland, has been working to address. He now works for a company called CoolIris where he works on a product called PicLens which is a browser plugin for IE/Win, Firefox/Win, FireFox/Mac and even Safari/Mac that enhances your photo browsing experience.

Once installed PicLens places a small translucent play button over photos on supported sites when you put your mouse over them. Supported sites include:

It also supports any site which uses the mediaRSS format. Once activated the PicLens plugin opens up a fantastic full screen app for viewing photos. Danny recently announced version 1.6 which includes a fantastic new feature called “the wall” which displays your photos in all their glory in a 3D environment allowing a fun and very easy way to skip through a photostream as shown below in the screenshot I capped of my own photostream.

I would highly recommend that everyone downloads this plugin, I have never found a more pleasurable interface to browsing photos. Rendering is smooth and satisfying and I wish to congratulate Danny and the team for their excellent work!