PicLens Plugin for Firefox

lungdoc · February 16, 2008

Seems to only make use of the thumbnail images from what I can tell, though it works well on Flickr. I'd love it if I can get it to work better.

Andy · February 16, 2008

lungdoc wrote:

Seems to only make use of the thumbnail images from what I can tell, though it works well on Flickr. I'd love it if I can get it to work better.

Got your note at the help desk, too - we've contacted the piclens peeps.

lungdoc · February 16, 2008

Andy wrote:

Got your note at the help desk, too - we've contacted the piclens peeps.

I have never seen such fast response to customer questions. Absolutely impressed and I'm sure this will be sorted out.

rdlugosz · February 16, 2008

just dropping by to leave a "me too" bump. I just loaded piclens (sweet, by the way!) and checked out my site.

Couple of issues I've noticed:

"Play" button only shows up on the thumbs (default smugmug/stretchy theme) and not on the large image
The master "launch piclens" (blue play button, top right of browser menu bar) doesn't "find any photos" when on a gallery page. It can only be launched by clicking the play button that pops up on thumbs.
Piclens only seems to use the thumbnails, not the larger res images.

Hopefully this list is helpful. Note that I *am* using my site via my custom domain, gallery.rrdphoto.com.

pwc · February 19, 2008

Wow! this is awesome. thanks for including it!
Yes, it would be cool if you could see the small or medium res images when zoomed in on PicLens rather than just a zoomed thumbnail. But it is a pretty good way to view images quickly.

havanese · February 22, 2008

pwc wrote:

Wow! this is awesome. thanks for including it!
Yes, it would be cool if you could see the small or medium res images when zoomed in on PicLens rather than just a zoomed thumbnail. But it is a pretty good way to view images quickly.

Just loaded this myself as it was talked about on dl.tv - wish the images on my smugmug account looked as good as the ones on my flickr acct.

Any update on the conversation sumg had with piclens people?

darryl · February 24, 2008

It's not Piclens fault. It's SmugMug's. I think.

The default size of photos served up in the per-gallery RSS feeds (and maybe all of them, I haven't had time to check) is the thumbnails we're seeing in PicLens. On Flickr, the default is original-sized images. Here's a snippet from a feed for one of my galleries:

        <media:content url="http://gladlee.smugmug.com/photos/250654955_t8Yej-Th.jpg" fileSize="5379" type="image/jpeg" medium="image" width="150" height="113" isDefault="1">
          <media:hash algo="md5">94e14593ea9a68bc089209514d6d4214</media:hash>
        </media:content>

And one from Flickr:

<media:content url="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1439/1398526020_7dc38113b6_o.jpg" 
				       type="image/jpeg"
				       height="2112"
				       width="2816"/>

There's other possibilities for the malfunction. Maybe PicLens doesn't like the hash? Maybe PicLens doesn't like that the image is part of a <media:group>? I believe those are both part of the Media RSS spec, so if PicLens is doing the right thing, then it's most likely that the fact that SmugMug specifies the thumbnail as the Default that's causing the problem.

Anybody (ahem, Devbobo :-) know *why* the RSS feed makes the Thumbnail the default? Seems to me that would make screensavers, photo frames and other RSS clients look really crappy too.

devbobo · February 24, 2008

darryl wrote:
It's not Piclens fault. It's SmugMug's. I think.

The default size of photos served up in the per-gallery RSS feeds (and maybe all of them, I haven't had time to check) is the thumbnails we're seeing in PicLens. On Flickr, the default is original-sized images. Here's a snippet from a feed for one of my galleries:
        <media:content url="http://gladlee.smugmug.com/photos/250654955_t8Yej-Th.jpg" fileSize="5379" type="image/jpeg" medium="image" width="150" height="113" isDefault="1">
          <media:hash algo="md5">94e14593ea9a68bc089209514d6d4214</media:hash>
        </media:content>
And one from Flickr:
<media:content url="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1439/1398526020_7dc38113b6_o.jpg" 
                       type="image/jpeg"
                       height="2112"
                       width="2816"/>
There's other possibilities for the malfunction. Maybe PicLens doesn't like the hash? Maybe PicLens doesn't like that the image is part of a <media:group>? I believe those are both part of the Media RSS spec, so if PicLens is doing the right thing, then it's most likely that the fact that SmugMug specifies the thumbnail as the Default that's causing the problem.

Anybody (ahem, Devbobo :-) know *why* the RSS feed makes the Thumbnail the default? Seems to me that would make screensavers, photo frames and other RSS clients look really crappy too.

Actually, I don't believe that you are correct. I believe that it doesn't have anything to do with isDefault being set, rather that the majority of these flash based slideshows, are hardcoded to only use one or at most three media:content elements.

Additionally, by setting &Size=Large on the feed url, the media:content element related to the large size image will have the attribute isDefault set to 1.

Nikolai · February 24, 2008

devbobo wrote:

Actually, I don't believe that you are correct. I believe that it doesn't have anything to do with isDefault being set, rather that the majority of these flash based slideshows, are hardcoded to only use one or at most three media:content elements.

Additionally, by setting &Size=Large on the feed url, the media:content element related to the large size image will have the attribute isDefault set to 1.

I don't know much about this web-rss-element stuff, but I too had contacted the Piclens and was advised to take it up with SM.
What I know is that it's degrading to the quality of both services

I think SM and PL need to talk directly, without any of us meddling...

It's probably something very simple, one-liner type of fixes, they just need to know what line it is...

devbobo · February 24, 2008

FWIW, I recently had some communication with Todd Dominey (developer of SlideShowPro), who wrote...

By the way, the parsing of your feeds works great, especially since you're making multiple media:content nodes available as part of a group. The 1.7 version of SSP has resolution detection built into it, so a user can choose whether they want "normal" size images from the Media RSS feed, or images optimized for full screen viewing. Whichever is chosen, SSP grabs the "best" image from each media:group and displays it.

devbobo · February 24, 2008

Nikolai wrote:

I don't know much about this web-rss-element stuff, but I too had contacted the Piclens and was advised to take it up with SM.
What I know is that it's degrading to the quality of both services
I think SM and PL need to talk directly, without any of us meddling...
It's probably something very simple, one-liner type of fixes, they just need to know what line it is...

can you please forward me that email to read.

Nikolai · February 25, 2008

devbobo wrote:

can you please forward me that email to read.

Sent...

darryl · February 25, 2008

devbobo wrote:

Actually, I don't believe that you are correct. I believe that it doesn't have anything to do with isDefault being set, rather that the majority of these flash based slideshows, are hardcoded to only use one or at most three media:content elements.

Additionally, by setting &Size=Large on the feed url, the media:content element related to the large size image will have the attribute isDefault set to 1.

Oh, I knew you were gonna say that. The thing with PicLens is that it parses the current page and looks for the feed on that page. Essentially, you can't really edit the URL. (Sure, I suppose you could embed the URL somewhere in the comments... oh wait, maybe I could use some JavaScript to tack that on to all feeds. Ew. Well, I suppose it might be an interesting test.)

devbobo · February 25, 2008

darryl wrote:

Oh, I knew you were gonna say that. The thing with PicLens is that it parses the current page and looks for the feed on that page. Essentially, you can't really edit the URL. (Sure, I suppose you could embed the URL somewhere in the comments... oh wait, maybe I could use some JavaScript to tack that on to all feeds. Ew. Well, I suppose it might be an interesting test.)

Darryl,

I have been doing some more checking into this. I believe that our feeds are MediaRSS compliant. Anyway, I have sent an email off to the people at Piclens and we'll see what happens.

Cheers,

David

rdlugosz · February 25, 2008

Are there still similar conflicts between the SM feed and the Google AJAX Slideshow? There's a thread floating around somewhere where this came up quite a while ago, but I think it eventually died out.

I'm mentioning this to make the point that more than one of these "feed-based media widget things" have problems with the SM media RSS feed, while they do not with (say) Flickr's.

David - thanks for looking into this stuff!

darryl · February 25, 2008

devbobo wrote:

Darryl,

I have been doing some more checking into this. I believe that our feeds are MediaRSS compliant. Anyway, I have sent an email off to the people at Piclens and we'll see what happens.

Cheers,

David

Hi David: I'm not saying SmugMug's feeds aren't compliant. I have great faith that they are. However I am wondering why isDefault defaults to the Thumbnail.

And yes, as rdlugosz points out, Google's slideshow widget for iGoogle appears to grab the thumbnail instead of the larger version as well.

In an ideal world you'd be able to specify the size you want to use for your widget, as SlideShowPro allows. But the world's not always ideal, eh? :-}

devbobo · February 25, 2008

rdlugosz wrote:

Are there still similar conflicts between the SM feed and the Google AJAX Slideshow? There's a thread floating around somewhere where this came up quite a while ago, but I think it eventually died out.

I'm mentioning this to make the point that more than one of these "feed-based media widget things" have problems with the SM media RSS feed, while they do not with (say) Flickr's.

David - thanks for looking into this stuff!

unfortunately, it's due to the lame way the google ajax slideshow has been implemented. The code does a document.getElementsByTagNameNS(" http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/", "content") and makes assumptions that the first and second elements in the resulting array are given sizes without checking width or height. This assumption might be fine for one or two services that only provide limited sizes, but when we are dealing with a larger number of image sizes...there isn't alot we can do.

rdlugosz · February 25, 2008

devbobo wrote:

unfortunately, it's due to the lame way the google ajax slideshow has been implemented. The code does a document.getElementsByTagNameNS(" http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/", "content") and makes assumptions that the first and second elements in the resulting array are given sizes without checking width or height. This assumption might be fine for one or two services that only provide limited sizes, but when we are dealing with a larger number of image sizes...there isn't alot we can do.

That makes a lot of sense, David. Thanks for the reply!

darryl · February 26, 2008

darryl wrote:

Hi David: I'm not saying SmugMug's feeds aren't compliant. I have great faith that they are. However I am wondering why isDefault defaults to the Thumbnail.

And yes, as rdlugosz points out, Google's slideshow widget for iGoogle appears to grab the thumbnail instead of the larger version as well.

In an ideal world you'd be able to specify the size you want to use for your widget, as SlideShowPro allows. But the world's not always ideal, eh? :-}

David, I finally got around to creating some test cases.

I took a recent gallery feed from my page, and saved it to a file. Linked a single thumbnail image to one of the original images in the feed file.

Here's that page: http://www.darryl.com/piclens/thumbs.html

If you open up the feed with PicLens (by clicking on the Play button), you'll see that images only expand up to Thumbnail size.

I then hacked the feed so that isDefault is set for X3, not Thumbs. And lo and behold, PicLens does the right thing and picks the bigger image.

Example: http://www.darryl.com/piclens/x3.html

So again, my question -- why does isDefault default to Thumbnail?

--Darryl

devbobo · February 26, 2008

darryl wrote:

why does isDefault default to Thumbnail?

isDefault is set to the Thumb size image as that is the size that is returned by feed by default.

Don't I will probably be having a call with the PicLens guys this week and we'll get it sorted out.

Cheers,

David

darryl · February 26, 2008

devbobo wrote:

isDefault is set to the Thumb size image as that is the size that is returned by feed by default.

What a very zen answer, Dev. :-}

Let me try to clarify: Suppose somebody finds a JavaScript or Flash slideshow, WordPress/Blogger plug-in, RSS photo frame, etc., and they want to use it to look at one of their SmugMug galleries or Recent Photo feeds.

Why should the *default* be to link to Thumbnail-sized images? I *know* that Size=Large or Size=X3 will take care of things, but if a user is just cutting and pasting the RSS link, shouldn't the default behavior be to link to a bigger size image? [Are you guys that worried about bandwidth? Heck, I'm just asking that it defaulted to Large, not Original.]

Users shouldn't have to worry about adding GET variables at the end of the RSS feed. It should, as they say, "just work."

Don't I will probably be having a call with the PicLens guys this week and we'll get it sorted out.

Thanks -- but I suspect they'll tell you what I've already discovered. They're respecting MediaRSS and isDefault just fine. It's just that SmugMug's default is Thumbs, which really doesn't work in the PicLens model where you *can't* specify the Size variable. (They don't have a place for you to enter in your RSS feed. They scrape it off of the page you're currently viewing.)

devbobo · February 26, 2008

darryl wrote:

What a very zen answer, Dev. :-}

Let me try to clarify: Suppose somebody finds a JavaScript or Flash slideshow, WordPress/Blogger plug-in, RSS photo frame, etc., and they want to use it to look at one of their SmugMug galleries or Recent Photo feeds.

Why should the *default* be to link to Thumbnail-sized images? I *know* that Size=Large or Size=X3 will take care of things, but if a user is just cutting and pasting the RSS link, shouldn't the default behavior be to link to a bigger size image? [Are you guys that worried about bandwidth? Heck, I'm just asking that it defaulted to Large, not Original.]

Users shouldn't have to worry about adding GET variables at the end of the RSS feed. It should, as they say, "just work."

Thanks -- but I suspect they'll tell you what I've already discovered. They're respecting MediaRSS and isDefault just fine. It's just that SmugMug's default is Thumbs, which really doesn't work in the PicLens model where you *can't* specify the Size variable. (They don't have a place for you to enter in your RSS feed. They scrape it off of the page you're currently viewing.)

My argument to this is...what is "default" anyway...what might be a fine default for a user with a 800x600 resolution screen isn't the same as me using 3840x1200. And since PicLens support panning and zooming as well, I believe that they should be selecting the image size from the feed that makes the most sense for the screen resolution that they are displaying it on.

And for the record, I am not opposed to changing the isDefault variable, but I want to get all the facts first and not make a knee jerk reaction to the situation

darryl · February 26, 2008

devbobo wrote:

My argument to this is...what is "default" anyway...what might be a fine default for a user with a 800x600 resolution screen isn't the same as me using 3840x1200. And since PicLens support panning and zooming as well, I believe that they should be selecting the image size from the feed that makes the most sense for the screen resolution that they are displaying it on.

And for the record, I am not opposed to changing the isDefault variable, but I want to get all the facts first and not make a knee jerk reaction to the situation

Ahh, you're absolutely right. PicLens should be smarter about detecting screen resolution and pick the correct media:content link. (I'm watching the USA Today interview with Chris and Don, and they *just* showed his dual 30" monitors... grrrr/drool.

Re: the current isDefault setting, I was just curious *why* Thumbnail was chosen as the default, and if it did in fact relate to bandwidth concerns.

cjyphoto · March 2, 2008

Will Piclens ever work on SmugMug?
I was just wondering if Piclens will ever work properly on SmugMug? As of now you can't even even search SmugMug using Piclens. For those not familiar with Piclens here is the link.

http://piclens.com/site/firefox/win/

ivar · March 2, 2008

See also http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=83182 and http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=85177

I think your question is better asked to the developers of PicLens as opposed to here

cjyphoto · March 2, 2008

Well, it does take two to make an app work right.

I've seen the other threads and I've seen that SmugMug reps have contacted PicLens. I just wondered what the results of those discussions were.

devbobo · March 2, 2008

I have spoken to them yet, probably tomorrow....but I did get this response via email...

Wanted to update you and let you know that we have fixed a bug in our code so that all SmugMug searches will work in PicLens using your RSS. Great success! We will push that in our next build.

rujero · March 6, 2008

Seconded
I love Smugmug and I love Piclens, can I just add myself to the list of people pushing for this integration to work properly?
Thanks, cheers, Ruggero Domenichini

darryl · March 8, 2008

PicLens v.1.6.2 for Firefox looks like it was released in the last day or two. Their release notes are not up-to-date (I guess it's an epidemic, snrk), but it now appears to work with SmugMug feeds!

I've tested the Recent Images feed in conjunction with my Recent Galleries hack (see http://gladlee.smugmug.com/) as well as individual gallery feeds.

Alas, it doesn't seem to work with the Popular Photos feed (upon double-clicking an image in Piclens, you only get the tiny or thumb version instead of a larger-sized image).

Hooray!

Andy · March 9, 2008

darryl wrote:

(I guess it's an epidemic, snrk)

Not very nice, since we've been uptodate after releases for quite some time now.

PicLens Plugin for Firefox

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