PicLens (www.piclens.com) is one of the coolest browser plug-ins I’ve seen so far. It allows you to watch photos and videos from Google, Yahoo, Flickr, PhotoBucket, SmugMug and DeviantArt in full screen and 3D. It works really fast and it’s a great new way of going through content quickly. What I really like about it is that whenever you start it it shows you the photos or videos from the page that you’re on, so for instance on Flickr you can start it from a photostream, collection, set or search results and the slick PicLens viewer will show only items that are available from that page. It’s available for IE, Firefox and Safari. Check out this cool demo:

Tonight I have been adding travel photos of ourselves to Flickr and ‘geotagging’ them. The result: a great interactive map of the world with dots of where we’ve been. It’s the online equivalent of having a map on the wall with thumbtacks. The Flickr website used to be very slow for us here in the Netherlands, but since last year it has been much faster (maybe because they moved from beta to gamma?). In fact, I can’t believe how fast it is to upload photos with the handy Flickr Uploadr, and I’ve never geotagged photos as easy as I have on Flickr. The maps that Flickr uses are from Yahoo! Maps (Flickr is owned by Yahoo), and that I find a bit of a downside; it’s much slower and the areal photos much less detailed than those of Google Maps. Still, I love this site and I’ll keep putting up our travel photos until you can’t see the map anymore from all the pink dots. More »