Cooliris V1.10 Released – 3D Online Photo Gallery

Written by Christian Milsom on April 23, 2009 · Filed under Internet, Tech 

Cooliris has been around for a while now, and has managed to rack up an impressive 12 million downloads of the plugin that allows you to browse and search media in a whole range of popular websites; but now they have got to update number 10 – and it is definitely one that will push it into the limelight.

Along with a few bug fixes and additional support (which I will get onto later) you will now be able to look at photos on your computer using the Cooliris set up, look through Facebook albums on the streaming 3D wall and get a whole lot more information about the images you are looking at.

But let’s take a step backwards for a second – what exactly is Cooliris? It is essentially a web browser plugin that provides ‘… interactive full screen slideshows of online images’. As dry as that definition may sound it is actually surprisingly fun and can be used in a whole host of situations.

Working with IE, Firefox and Safari it’s a massive 3D wall on which are all of the pictures on the webpage/search/hard drive that you are looking at – one that you can easily scroll along and see the images quickly. But it doesn’t just work with images, it also works well with videos and the ‘Window Shopping’ feature adds yet more possibilities.

The good thing is that this works with loads of sites that you will actually use – Google Images, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, deviantART and Picasa are just a few of the long list of sites that work with the plugin and in fact any website that implements Media RSS tags in the HTML pages will work just as well.

Not limited to the obvious slideshow and favourite features there are several others that stand out as being incredibly practical – the ‘Sharing’ function for example allows you to easily share media with friends using drag and drop; you can even include messages for the more ambiguous ones!

The 3D window shopping tool is another that stands out – it allows you to browse and search through products sold in a variety of big stores which you can then select to find out prices and jump to product pages. This has been added to in V1.10 as you can now find out even more product information and descriptions making the whole thing a lot more useful.

The second of the new features is also very cool, and it means you can easily browse through all of the photos on your hard drive really quickly and in a way that is dead easy to see – the same system now works completely with Facebook allowing you to browse through albums (complete with ‘titles, tags and more’) as well as clicking through to see all the photos of people tagged.

The additional support I mentioned earlier includes Linux, Flock and Blinx as well as allowing you to watch Metacafe videos. This is probably also a good time to point out that it also works with the iPhone which suits it very well!

In conclusion Cooliris is a really nice plugin and once you’ve started using it you will find it hard to go back to the slow and repetitive alternative; the new features added into V1.10 were definitely needed and they certainly do their job well; my only qualm is the fact that it doesn’t work with the Google Chrome browser yet – roll on Cooliris V1.11!

Via – Cooliris