Jul 09 2008
Picsviewr - web-based Flickr slideshow viewer
On Friendfeed today I saw a pointer to a post by Orli Yakuel about Picsviewr, so I thought I’d check it out, seeing that it had a good Web 2.0 name with a vowel missing and all..
Picsviewr basically grabs your publicly viewable Flickr images using the Flickr API and offers 8 templates for displaying your images as different ’slideshows’. While it doesn’t have many features other than the slideshows which appear within your browser, I was quite taken by a couple of the templates - the ‘Polaroid gallery’ and ‘Tiltviewer’ in particular. As I store more personal photos privately on Flickr than I post publicly, I couldn’t help think that it would be nice if it would allow you to login to your Flickr account to view your sets etc and use the Picsviewr slideshows to have more fun viewing your images that are marked private for family or friends only. This would likely add another layer of complexity for the Picsviewr folks regarding the sign-in process, so perhaps this is something for the future.
As Orli mentions, there is not much else to the service, but my family and I were quite taken with the ease with which the slideshows were created and rendered so beautifully.
The Picsviewr news page (which seems to be the closest thing to a blog that they have so far) hasn’t been updated since launch date in March 2008, so it’s hard to tell what is happening behind the scenes and where the service is headed next. The FAQ page says that new features are in the pipeline, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens from here..