Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

I’ve been watching Cooliris over the past few years and have been super excited about the technology that they’ve been developing. If you haven’t seen Cooliris yet, let me just say it is the most stunning way to browse photos available on the web today hands down. I have seen no other browsing tool that is as beautiful as Cooliris. When you view a page in Cooliris the photos from the page just float by. You easily move the mouse to browse in a wave like motion across the sea photos and use your scroll wheel or trackpad to zoom in and out seeing photos in their full high res glory.

It’s sort of like coverflow for the Mac, but only 100x better.

But as much as I’ve enjoyed *browsing* photos with Cooliris in the past, in the end I found that experience to be lacking. I want to do a lot more with photos than just browse. I want to interact. And in the past there was no easy way to interact with photos on Cooliris except in Cooliris’ own proprietary playground. That was until this past weekend. This past weekend Cooliris released Cooliris v. 1.11 and with this release they’ve moved the Cooliris experience into a browser tab. What does this mean? This means that rather than having Cooliris take over your whole computer screen and computer, you can now browse using it and fully utilize all the power of your browser.

More specifically, this means that as I browse photos using Cooliris that I can cmd-click (or ctl-click for those of you on PCs) on an image’s link page and Firefox (or IE if you’re on a PC — joking, folks, joking) will open that photo’s page in a background tab. This means that you can use the power of Cooliris to browse, and then select photos as you go that you’d like to fave, comment on, etc. and once you are done browsing they’ll already be opened in new tabs for you where you can go interact with them directly.

This is exactly the feature that I was waiting for from CoolIris to begin using it full time as my primary way to browse photos. No more crappy little thumbnail pages from flickr, or even their small photo sized alternative, now simply load up your favorite photostream or search term or group pool or set and browse with full high res large sized glory while still being able to easily load images you’d like to interact with in background tabs. The Cooliris view for sets even looks far better than Flickr’s own slideshow view.

Once you find a page on Flickr that you want to browse, simply click on the little CoolIris icon as you hover over a photo and it will launch a Cooliris version in a new tab.

Cooliris has also made some additional enhancements for Flickr including giving you the ability to make a hyperlink of a Cooliris view of a particular set/stream/pool etc. and then share that with others. To see what I’m talking about feel free to click on this Cooliris view of my 10 faves or more set on Flickr. Pretty damn slick huh? Want to fave a few of these? You know you do Just cmd-click on the go to photo page when you select a photo and it will load it in a background tab for you.

You can get and install Cooliris here.

A video of how Cooliris works here. Cooliris’ blog post announcing the new version here.

Nice work Cooliris. Congrats on the release!

Oh and once you install Cooliris definitely go fave diving in some of your favorite Flickr user’s streams. Emma’s favorites knock my socks off. Go see them here.