PicLens Plugin for Firefox

13

Comments

  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited March 9, 2008
    Andy wrote:
    Not very nice, since we've been uptodate after releases for quite some time now.

    :D

    You're right. I was probably thinking about post-mortem/status reports when the servers are down for unscheduled downtime, which is also bad:

    http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=737595#post737595
  • rujerorujero Registered Users Posts: 15 Big grins
    edited March 10, 2008
    Working but buggy
    It works for me, but I have to click on the arrow on one of the thumbnails, the little arrow in the blue square in the browser menu bar does (top right) does not work.
    Also it seems there is a maximum number of pictures that can be handled ...
  • rujerorujero Registered Users Posts: 15 Big grins
    edited March 10, 2008
    One more thing
    The title in the top left corner say "Piclens for RSS" intead of "Piclens for Smugmug"
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited March 10, 2008
    darryl wrote:
    You're right. I was probably thinking about post-mortem/status reports when the servers are down for unscheduled downtime, which is also bad:

    http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=737595#post737595
    Darryl, you've known Don for some time.. when he has something meaningful to say, he'll say it.
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited March 10, 2008
    Piclens clap.gifclap.gif wow

    Got it on my Mac and my Windows machines thumb.gif
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited March 10, 2008
    Andy wrote:
    Darryl, you've known Don for some time.. when he has something meaningful to say, he'll say it.

    Actually, I only "know" Don through his somewhat rare postings on Dgrin as well as in his blog. As well as various interviews, etc. Otherwise I don't think we've really corresponded much. I do appreciate the frankness of his Dgrin postings and blog posts.

    To avoid hijacking this thread, I'll post a fuller reply in that other thread.
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited March 10, 2008
    Oh yeah, it doesn't work for "unlisted" galleries. RSS feeds don't show up for those galleries. That doesn't make sense to me.

    It seems to me that you might want to use a screensaver/desktop switcher/photo frame/FireFox plug-in with an "unlisted" gallery. This is *not* a password-protected gallery.

    There's no mention of this here: http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-albums
    Or here: http://www.smugmug.com/help/rss-atom-feeds

    I hope this wasn't a "bug" that was "fixed" here:
    * Fixed a bug that could allow a feeds to function on a protected gallery.
    (Found here: http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/2008/02/29/a-step-back-to-move-ahead/)

    Because to me, that's not a bug.
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited March 10, 2008
    darryl wrote:
    Oh yeah, it doesn't work for "unlisted" galleries. RSS feeds don't show up for those galleries. That doesn't make sense to me.

    It seems to me that you might want to use a screensaver/desktop switcher/photo frame/FireFox plug-in with an "unlisted" gallery. This is *not* a password-protected gallery.

    There's no mention of this here: http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-albums
    Or here: http://www.smugmug.com/help/rss-atom-feeds

    I hope this wasn't a "bug" that was "fixed" here:
    * Fixed a bug that could allow a feeds to function on a protected gallery.
    (Found here: http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/2008/02/29/a-step-back-to-move-ahead/)

    Because to me, that's not a bug.
    Whoa, wait a minute.

    You want feeds to pull from unlisted galleries, for the general public? ear.gif
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited March 10, 2008
    Andy wrote:
    Whoa, wait a minute.

    You want feeds to pull from unlisted galleries, for the general public? <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/ear.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >

    No. For a specific unlisted gallery, let's say, "Cute pictures of your grandchild in the tub", it would be nice to have that feed be readily available to use in a digital frame, or PicLens Firefox Plug-in.

    I actually mailed support about this, and Sebastian replied:
    Thank you for contacting SmugMug. Unlisted galleries have feeds, but
    they aren't advertised in your browser as they haven't been in the past.
    You can access their feeds using the feed url in combination with their
    galleryID and key.

    Here's our wiki on feeds:
    http://wiki.smugmug.com/display/SmugMug/Feeds+Examples

    Here's an example for an unlisted gallery:
    http://api.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=4075742_4kkWH&format=atom0
    +3

    That's great, but makes it 1) difficult on grandparents, 2) unusable for PicLens, because PicLens relies on there being a <link> with the feed.

    I'm really only concerned about #2, but I really don't see what the big deal is with an RSS badge showing up on unlisted albums.
  • afarberafarber Registered Users Posts: 267 Major grins
    edited March 11, 2008
    **EDIT: Wow. After writing this I went to my Firefox Add Ons and clicked find updates. Lo and behold, PicLens updated and is now grabbing the higher res photos!! How odd that 10 minutes ago I installed and it didn't install the latest version automatically. Anyway, problem solved. This is very cool**

    Been reading through this thread. Am I correct that PicLens seems to be working nicely with Smugmug EXCEPT that it still only pulls the ugly thumbnail size?

    Is there an easy way around that or a timeframe for an update? That's probably a question for PicLens, but maybe someone here knows.

    Thanks! What a great way to show someone your galleries.
  • asigiam60asigiam60 Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
    edited March 13, 2008
    Do you have to do something special.....
    The piclens extension works on some galleries on smugmug, but none of mine. Is there some sort of setting I need to do?
  • afarberafarber Registered Users Posts: 267 Major grins
    edited March 13, 2008
    I didn't do anything. It does have a limit of 100 photos in a single gallery. You need to initiate it by clicking on the arrow that appears on one of the first 100 thumbnails in a gallery.
    asigiam60 wrote:
    The piclens extension works on some galleries on smugmug, but none of mine. Is there some sort of setting I need to do?
  • devbobodevbobo Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 4,339 SmugMug Employee
    edited March 14, 2008
    afarber wrote:
    I didn't do anything. It does have a limit of 100 photos in a single gallery. You need to initiate it by clicking on the arrow that appears on one of the first 100 thumbnails in a gallery.

    not for long :D

    265595975_SuqDa-XL.png
    David Parry
    SmugMug API Developer
    My Photos
  • asigiam60asigiam60 Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
    edited March 14, 2008
    none of my galleries work
    It still doesn't work for me. I've got the extension, running the newest available. Works on others. My galleries are at welchphotos.smugmug.com. Can someone see if it works for them? I promise I'm not crazy :)
  • devbobodevbobo Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 4,339 SmugMug Employee
    edited March 17, 2008
    bump mwink.gif

    devbobo wrote:
    not for long :D

    265595975_SuqDa-XL.png
    David Parry
    SmugMug API Developer
    My Photos
  • RedricoRedrico Registered Users Posts: 4 Beginner grinner
    edited March 25, 2008
    Piclens & Password Protection
    I have noticed and tested that Piclens add on will not work for password protected galleries...even after entering the password. Why is this? Is anyone else having trouble like this? If so, is there a work-around.

    Thanks,
    Redrico
  • asigiam60asigiam60 Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
    edited April 15, 2008
    PicLens still not working on my stuff...
    I have reset my whole smugmug site to defaults. No custom css/html/javascript and it still doesn't work. It's killing me
    :deadhorse
  • BradfordBennBradfordBenn Registered Users Posts: 2,506 Major grins
    edited April 19, 2008
    Okay I am still stumped
    Howdy All-

    First let me say that I appreciate the efforts put in to make this work. It is hard for both parties (PicLens & SmugMug) at times to know where the problems might lie. I deal with this issue every day at work. Is it our application or is it .... well the list goes on.

    So before I posted I did some searches and I was still not 100% sure what step I missed. So here is what I did and all the info to hopefully help us figure out what step I missed.

    I made sure that RSS was enabled on the gallery (http://bradfordbenn.smugmug.com/gallery/2880108_DUEDB) I am just using this one to test for now.
    I logged out of the account.
    I made sure that I have the most recent FireFox for Mac Leopard (2.0.0.14) and most recent PicLens (1.6.2.1659).
    I went to Google Images to make sure PicLens was working.
    I went to the Gallery in question and tried PicLens, I got a message that "The site does not yet support PicLens"

    Did I miss something?ne_nau.gif

    Thanks
    -=Bradford

    Pictures | Website | Blog | Twitter | Contact
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited April 20, 2008
    Hi Bradford:

    I'm not sure why, but when I view your site in "all thumbs" style, the little play button icons show up when I hover over any of the thumbs, and clicking on them gets me into Piclens. This doesn't work in "smugmug" style for your site.

    It does work, however for my sites, as well as my friend's who is a Power, not a Pro user.

    Do you see the play button icons on this site:
    http://darryl.smugmug.com/gallery/4678258_Rqcxf#276556246_8Jx5H

    Are you a Standard, Power, or Pro user? I wonder if that has anything to do with it...
  • BradfordBennBradfordBenn Registered Users Posts: 2,506 Major grins
    edited April 20, 2008
    Howdy-

    Okay so here is what I found out from some more testing...

    I am a Power User
    I get the play button in Thumbs view
    The Play button does not work on the toolbar no matter the view, both on my site and on Darryl's site

    I made sure I was logged out. This one is a little puzzling ain't it
    -=Bradford

    Pictures | Website | Blog | Twitter | Contact
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited April 21, 2008
    Oh yeah, that toolbar thing has never worked for me.

    Do you see the play buttons in my thumbnails when you're using "smugmug" style?

    --Darryl
  • turtlebudturtlebud Registered Users Posts: 14 Big grins
    edited May 10, 2008
    might shed some light on this
    I've been having problems trying to get piclens to work on any smugmug sites, but no problems on flickr or picasa web galleries. I am using firefox on a mac.

    I think part of the problem was that I was looking for the little play button on the individual pictures because that's how it shows up on flickr & picasa, but I never saw any. However, there's also a little play button above the bookmark toolbar to activate piclens. That was the first revelation of how to get it to work with smugmug. Unfortunately, I got a message that "this webiste doesn't support piclens"

    So I tried it on XP using IE6 & Firefox. Again, no play button on the pictures, but there is a play button above the address bar for the web browser for firefox. Guess what - clicking on that play button works! It activates piclens for that specific gallery that you are viewing.

    My conclusion is that the issue is a compatiblity with the mac version of the plug in that the windows version doesn't have problems with. I'll check with the piclens devs to see if they have a fix for it.

    Update: Safari still doesn't work, but for some strange (good) reason, firefox is now working with public galleries. I think private galleries will not work (which is okay with me). Just use the active piclens/play button on the toolbar once you're in the smugmug gallery that you want to view.
  • jwalkerohjwalkeroh Registered Users Posts: 165 Major grins
    edited May 30, 2008
    piclens lite
    Piclens works great for me.

    I have an observation regarding earlier posts re welchphotos and bradfordbenn issue with piclens. For both when in "Style: SmugMug" do not have square thumbs. It seems that all others with square thumbs work fine. Maybe there's a conflict with those non-square thumbs.

    Has anyone tried Piclens Lite? Where does one start?
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited May 30, 2008
    I don't think there's a problem with square thumbs except that the transitions from square to rectangular look kinda crappy in PicLens. (Yet another reason to hate square thumbs, along with random cropping.)

    As far as PicLens Lite goes -- I suppose you could load up their JS file in the custom SmugMug Head section, like so:
    <*script type="text/javascript" src="http://lite.piclens.com/current/piclens.js"></script*>
    

    (Remove * before and after script)

    And then throw a button in say, the album description, like so?
    <html>
    <a href="javascript:PicLensLite.start();">Start PicLens <
    img src="http://lite.piclens.com/images/PicLensButton.png" alt="PicLens" width="
    16" height="12" border="0" align="absmiddle"></a>
    </html>
    

    Hey, whaddya know, it works:

    http://darryl.smugmug.com/gallery/4027723_btt8m#234437193_t6MQw

    If you have the PicLens plug-in installed, it will start up PicLens automagically. If not, it'll fire up a pretty nice Flash version of PicLens w/o the 3D wall effects. If your Flash version is not new enough (9.something), it should bring up Lytebox, a nifty Javascript photo viewer.

    Alas, PicLens does not seem to be able to grok SmugMug's video section of the RSS file, nor can it play MP4 files. (They support FLV, so YouTube works, and I've got a hack to let it work with Phanfare too.)
  • jwalkerohjwalkeroh Registered Users Posts: 165 Major grins
    edited May 30, 2008
    darryl wrote:
    I don't think there's a problem with square thumbs except that the transitions from square to rectangular look kinda crappy in PicLens. (Yet another reason to hate square thumbs, along with random cropping.)

    As far as PicLens Lite goes -- I suppose you could load up their JS file in the custom SmugMug Head section, like so:
    <*script type="text/javascript" src="http://lite.piclens.com/current/piclens.js"></script*>
    
    (Remove * before and after script)

    And then throw a button in say, the album description, like so?
    <html>
    <a href="javascript:PicLensLite.start();">Start PicLens <
    img src="http://lite.piclens.com/images/PicLensButton.png" alt="PicLens" width="
    16" height="12" border="0" align="absmiddle"></a>
    </html>
    
    Hey, whaddya know, it works:

    http://darryl.smugmug.com/gallery/4027723_btt8m#234437193_t6MQw

    If you have the PicLens plug-in installed, it will start up PicLens automagically. If not, it'll fire up a pretty nice Flash version of PicLens w/o the 3D wall effects. If your Flash version is not new enough (9.something), it should bring up Lytebox, a nifty Javascript photo viewer.

    Alas, PicLens does not seem to be able to grok SmugMug's video section of the RSS file, nor can it play MP4 files. (They support FLV, so YouTube works, and I've got a hack to let it work with Phanfare too.)

    I'm seeing one issue on your album and mine. When I launch the PicLensLite show only one square thumb (the first image) shows up in the show. I don't have the PicLens plug-in installed. I'm getting same behavior on FF and IE6. Are you seeing that behavior? I think we need a tweak to the way the PicLensLite is finding the RSS feed. Here's mine:

    http://www.nikiwalkerphotography.com/gallery/4946254_R3Qcv#296678724_bKkoH
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited May 30, 2008
    I think it's a bug in PicLens Lite. The PicLens plug-in can find and parse the correct feed (which should be the rss+xml one). I'll drop a note to PicLens support.

    --Darryl
  • jwalkerohjwalkeroh Registered Users Posts: 165 Major grins
    edited May 30, 2008
    Here's another observation. If you install the PicLens plugin and navigate to a gallery that has the PicLensLite button installed (as descibed above in the gallery description), then when you hover over a thumb you do not get the PicLens plugin's button on the thumb as you might expect. Then if you hit the PicLensLite button (in the gallery description) it runs the plugin's show (I think that is good desireable behavior, but not what you would expect) and not PicLensLite. For all other galleries, when you hover over a thumb you do get the PicLens button on the thumb, and hitting it causes the plugin show to run as expected. Hope this helps.
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited May 30, 2008
    jwalkeroh wrote:
    Here's another observation. If you install the PicLens plugin and navigate to a gallery that has the PicLensLite button installed (as descibed above in the gallery description), then when you hover over a thumb you do not get the PicLens plugin's button on the thumb as you might expect. Then if you hit the PicLensLite button (in the gallery description) it runs the plugin's show (I think that is good desireable behavior, but not what you would expect) and not PicLensLite. For all other galleries, when you hover over a thumb you do get the PicLens button on the thumb, and hitting it causes the plugin show to run as expected. Hope this helps.

    That's not the behavior with Firefox on Window XP Pro here. Are you running in IE? I don't have the plug-in installed for IE.
  • jwalkerohjwalkeroh Registered Users Posts: 165 Major grins
    edited May 31, 2008
    darryl wrote:
    That's not the behavior with Firefox on Window XP Pro here. Are you running in IE? I don't have the plug-in installed for IE.

    I tested some more. IE6 works differently than FF. In IE6, it works as I described above but only after you have launched the show once then exit the show and return to the gallery. Then the PicLens buttons no longer show on the thumbs. FF does not seem to exhibit that behavior.

    As for hitting the PicLensLite button with the PicLens plugin installed, the documented (I snooped in the piclens.js comments) behavior is to launch the plugin, and that's the behavior I see in both IE6 and FF.

    Have you contacted them about the failure of PicLensLite without the plugin to show all the images in the gallery/feed? Hope they provide a fix soon.
  • jwalkerohjwalkeroh Registered Users Posts: 165 Major grins
    edited May 31, 2008
    Are you ready for PicLens?
    Here's a new thought on PicLens. I have a wide range of emotions regarding it:

    Wow - great - slick - can't wait to use it - not bad - ho hum - maybe - not for me - not on my site

    I do like it, and I believe we'll see more iterations of functions and tools like it. But shouldn't SM want a little more control? Customers of SM should be able to customize just about every feature, and the higher the level of customer the greater the expectation of control over customization. Personally I'd like to see a slideshow like it as an option for the bio slideshows that many customers use, or the slideshow that runs when you hit the SM slideshow button if you have chosen to leave it active. We should have many choices for such slideshows, and I'm guessing we will as SM matures.

    The challenge of PicLens: Right now PicLens is intrusive and SM has little control. Once a user installs the plugin, PicLens does what it wants with its UI -- favorable or not to SM and its customers and users.

    The first thing to love or hate is the PicLens play buttons that are thrust onto our carefully designed sites and selected thumbs. Hit the mysterious button and away goes the user into a UI that may or may not be desirable for them, and may or may not help or hurt our individual efforts to craft sites for our products. I'm not crazy about giving a plugin that much freedom over what I present to my users.

    Second, at the top of the plugin display it says "PicLens view for SmugMug". We should be able to customize this to say "... for ".

    So how does a SM customer control PicLens?

    How does SM control PicLens?

    Where's the quality control? What happens if SM makes a change in the feeds or design that breaks PicLens, or if PicLens makes a change that now all of a sudden forces SM to respond to keep up because you know many of us will come to depend on the PicLens experience if our users like it or want it.

    The business and techincal model just doesn't seem ready for prime time.

    SM's endorsement for PicLens is implicit on their site, and it's listed on the SM Wiki. Is that endorsement sanctioned by SM?

    I hope this stimulates discussion on the topic. As I said before. I like it -- and I hate it. I want to use it on my terms, not PicLens terms, or not at all if it just isn't ready yet. I've installed it on IE and FF and it seems to work fairly well. Based on this thread it didn't start "working" with SM until a few days ago. PicLens Lite still has issue. Hopefully those will be resolved in a few days too. I look forward to everyone's feedback...
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