gHacks technology news » piclens http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Searching Faces at FaceSaerch http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/04/searching-faces-at-facesaerch/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/04/searching-faces-at-facesaerch/#comments Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:38:11 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5853 Yes that is no type there in the title of this article. The website FaceSaerch offers a face search interface and search engine that displays pictures of people that it found while looking for the phrase that the user has entered. It is a bit surprising that the search box accepts not only names but also any other input.

Entering Kill Bill for instance displays lots of pictures of actors that played in that movie. The search engine is pretty good at finding pictures of celebrities but I had less luck finding pictures of ordinary people. I checked some random Facebook profile pages and tried to find the pictures with the search engine but ran out of luck.

That’s a little bit surprising because FaceSaerch is using Google Images and their &imgtype=face parameter to find matching faces. The interface is pretty slick and has some nice effects when flipping through the hits.

face search

It’s possible to turn safesearch off in the options which are located in the about page of the website. Deeply hidden I would say. Facesaerch provides several comfortable tools like adding widgets to another website or using RSS Feeds for searches.

An alternative would be Piclens but that would require an installation. FaceSaerch works just like it is.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Related posts

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/04/searching-faces-at-facesaerch/feed/ 5 Piclens adds Youtube support http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/07/piclens-adds-youtube-support/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/07/piclens-adds-youtube-support/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 10:54:39 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4035 I got an email yesterday from the Cooliris Team who have published a new version of Piclens, a browser extension that is available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. The new version added several interesting new features, among them support for Firefox 3 and Youtube 3D browsing support. The Youtube addition is probably the biggest new function in this release.

I had some troubles locating it first but once you know where to look and what to do it turns out to be extremely well done. The easiest way to access this new feature is by opening Piclens by clicking on the Launch Piclens button in the browser toolbar. This opens up Piclens in full screen mode with an option to search seven of the supported websites including Youtube.

Once you have entered a first search term and picked Youtube from the list you will be presented with a 3D image wall of Youtube videos. The usual Piclens controls apply, you can move around with the mouse and a click loads the video in an instant.

The videos usually take a second or two to start playing but this is probably the coolest and best way to enjoy Youtube. It’s definitely easier than browsing on the Youtube website. If you can live without comments and ratings then Piclens is the right choice for Youtube addicts.

One side effect that I noticed though is that Piclens seemed to have removed the urls from the location bar. Not only from one tab but from all tabs and that it is not possible to load URLs by copying and pasting them in the location bar. Could be that another Firefox extension is interfering but I only have a few installed right now. The most likely candidate would be Tiny Menu.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Related posts

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/07/piclens-adds-youtube-support/feed/ 8 Piclens a Firefox Image Viewer Extension http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/30/piclens-a-firefox-image-viewer-extension/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/30/piclens-a-firefox-image-viewer-extension/#comments Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:00:11 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/30/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.

piclens firefox extension

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.

Read More:

Piclens Homepage

Tags: , , , ,

Related posts

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/30/piclens-a-firefox-image-viewer-extension/feed/ 8