Piclens a Firefox Image Viewer Extension

Piclens is a great Firefox extension that adds image viewer capabilities to Firefox. It adds a full screen display on supported sites showing the selected image plus all other images in a thumbnail bar at the bottom. The extension does not work on all sites but on some major ones such as Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Friendster, Picase Web Albums and RSS Media Feeds.

If you hang out at these sites you should definitely consider trying and using Piclens to enhance your viewing experience. Piclens adds a little 'play' icon in the lower left corner of every image which starts the full screen image viewer showing the selected image in full screen mode.

It is then possible to navigate the images using your mouse or the cursor keys. A slideshow has been implemented as well which displays all images one after the other.

A click on the > icon in the top left corner loads the website the image is hosted on which could be different from the website that you started Piclens with.

Piclens supports multi-page search results when you use it to view images at Google Images or Yahoo images. Basically a way to browse all pictures at once without the need to click to load the next batch of results.

Update: Piclens is not available anymore. The company behind the program has released another extension for Firefox called Cool Previews that you can use to preview images and other contents (links) on websites. It basically enables you to preview contents that are linked on a page without leaving that page. While that may not make it an image browser extension, it can still be used to effectively browse though a page full of image search results without leaving it.

What I particularly like about Cool Previews is the fact that you can hover over any image to see it in a preview overlay window on the same page. Even better, it is possible to pin that overlay to the browser window so that it remains visible all the time to speed up previewing different images further.

To preview images on some sites, you need to hover over the thumbnail image first and then click on the small cool previews icon that is displayed next to it to do so.

You can modify a couple of preferences in the settings. Here you can define the position and speed of the preview icon and window, turn off the right-click menu, or change the search engines that the extension makes available to you.

It is more of an image previewing extension now and not an image browser anymore, but it works considerably well nevertheless.

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