FlickrLeech (because paging sucks) is my favorite third party app at present that uses the Flickr API. FlickrLeech was developed by Andrew Houser (a great photographer) and it will seriously transform your Flickr experience.
FlickrLeech is the ultimate efficiency tool for the Flickr power user. Allowing you much larger pages of thumbnails, Flickrleech allows you to very, very quickly get a aerial sort of overview of a Flickr user’s photostream. It also allows you far better searching than Flickr itself.
When you search on Flickr itself the site fetches 24 thumbnails for you at a time. FlickrLeech on the other hand fetches you *200* thumbnails at a time. Some of you might remember the good old days (for about a week or two I think) when FlickrLeech used to return unlimited thumbnails on a page. I’m sure loading 14,000 thumbnails on a single page wasn’t really in anyone’s best bandwidth interest and the 200 thumbnails to a page now still is killer hot donkeyness.
If we were comparing Flickr to a camera, Flickr would be a point and shoot and FlickrLeech would be a full fledged Canon 5D with a serious L series piece of glass on it.
Anyways, part of why I’m a bit excited is that I’ve been playing around tonight with a private beta version of FlickrLeech 2. And as good as FlickrLeech is, FlickrLeech 2 is that much better. I’m not allowed to share screenshots yet as Houser’s still finishing up some of the final touches on the site, but let this post be your wake up call to head on over to FlickrLeech and sign up for fill out Houser’s survey to sign up for the beta release which will be shortly released to early testers.
By the way, if you are a heavy user of FlickrLeech consider kicking some cash Houser’s way to help pay for the bandwidth of his site. He’s got a donate button on the site.
I’ll post more on FlickrLeech (including screenshots) as it develops and as soon as Houser is ready. Stay tuned. You are going to like this.
Thomas,
FlickrLeech 2 sounds cool. I having been using http://www.piclens.com/ and it rocks for flickr. If you haven’t looked at it yet give it a try. Works on Firefox or Safari.
I am not affiliated with piclens in anyway, Just like it so much I want to help spread the word
Hey man… thanks for the hook-up! I appreciate it.
Greg (and others). I’ve been asked to take a look at integrating PicLens support in FlickrLeech 2. Quite honestly, I wasn’t sure if people wanted FlickrLeech 2 to have a 3D view like PicLens (via FlashPlayer) or simply allow people to view results in PicLens.
I’ve tried PicLens and it is a very cool tool. Mucho kudos to the developers over at cooliris. For me, I’m not sure how much of it is novelty and how much of it is useful, but it is very cool. I wish that the plug-in a) could tell what the max resolution of an image is so that when you throw it to full creen it doesn’t look pixelated (ie. cap the display to the full resolution – don’t push it) and b) that it was supported on more than just FireFox and Safari. It’s too niche that way, despite FireFox’s overwhelming market share dominance.
It’s a cool plug-in for people to try, and once I have FlickrLeech 2 out the door, I may look into supporting a handful of plugins, one of them being PicLens. But remember, PicLens requires you go to a page to “start the show”. FlickrLeech bring the content to you. It allows for searching and I won’t give too much away, but more ways to explore the data than only what is on the interestingness page, for example.
Stay tuned for the private beta to launch very shortly.
Thanks again Thomas!
Andrew,
Not having seen FlickrLeech 1 or 2 I really can’t comment on it (hint, hint).
I couldn’t really care less about the 3D view of pic lens. What I like is the full screen view and the ability to go through an entire flickr stream in full screen with out having to hit next page. Now I just wish they would add the ability to comment and favorite photos within pic lens.
I look forward to checking out FlickrLeech 2
I’ve used FlickrLeech before and found it very cool.
But then I tried PicLens and the UI is just phenomenal (especially on my 30″ Apple Cinema Display).
Paging does suck, but in FlickrLeech you still have to page, just less often.
“killer hot donkeyness”? Marvellous.
Wow, that rocks! Thanks for doing thi, Andrew, and thank you, Thomas, for posting about it.
How about a ZooomrLeeche? That would be a neat tool
Having discovered PicLens through Greg’s comment, I’ve been enjoying it a lot.
What I do find interesting is that it appears to allow me to view full size images fro users who don’t allow their full-size images to be viewed.
I wrote more on that on my blog.
(you should delete that stupid comment by anonymous)
It seems Flickrleech has had the plug pulled by the server admins due to excessive load on the servers.
Shame!
the link to Flickr leech is broken.
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