If you are familiar with PicLens, then you’re probably familiar with CoolIris. If you’ve never heard of either one, you’re in for a real treat. When one of my employees showed me PicLens some time ago, it was one of the coolest improvements to my browsing experience that I’d see in a while. With the name change to CoolIris, comes more features, cool shopping search, and a much appreciated iPhone version.

Let’s drool over CoolIris for a minute
Before pagination (click for the next page of whatever) was invented, you’d have to sit there on your 2400 baud modem, waiting three hours for a page full of images to load up. Then, as faster modems were challenged by larger images, pagination was introduced, allowing us to load up ten or twenty images per page, but you couldn’t get a quick glimpse of everything anymore. Then came CoolIris (then PicLens).

If you have the plugin installed and the site you’re viewing supports the technology (most of the big ones do), you’ll see a new little watermark in the corner of each image you hold your mouse cursor over. Click that watermark to launch CoolIris and you get a full-screen image gallery like the one shown above. If you click anywhere and drag, you’ll be dragging the whole gallery to see more images.

Click on any image and you get a closer view like below, which you can double-click to view full screen:

Search, shop, and share easily
One of the features I’ve always been fond of from day one is the search. As a web developer, I’m constantly looking for images for use or just for comparison. Traditionally, I would head to Google and search, but Google’s image search is very clumsy when it comes to getting at the actual image. With this, I just search, scroll, and double-click.

I don’t recall seeing shopping in the early versions. Frankly, I’m not sure how much I’ll really use it, but there are times when you want an item and the appearance is critical. Sometimes you know it’s a watch, but not the brand or model number and a gallery of men’s watches would be perfect for finding it. How about Laptops and accessories? I searched for “laptops” for my example below, and CoolIris dug through its shopping sources and handed me a ton of laptop and laptop-related images. If you mouse over any item in the search results, you get a peek at the price. If you choose a “Store” from the top left, you can then sort by price (high-to-low or low-to-high) or by whatever that other search option is. I’m stumped.

The latest version also provides a slick way to share images and other media with friends and colleagues. Create a CoolIris account (just so it has your name and email address) and log in when you start CoolIris. At any time while logged in, just click the little right-arrow-in-a-circle icon at the bottom and the sharing panel will appear. In that panel, you can type in the address you want to send to as well as a message. Below that is a space for you to drag images and videos. Drag them in and send. Mine showed up lightning fast.

Tips and shortcuts
- You can navigate the gallery and slideshow with your arrow keys
- Use the ENTER key to zoom in on an image
- Hit the space bar to start the slide show
- You can send multiple items at once. Just drag more items into the little sharing box.
- Just like your browser, CoolIris remembers where you were. Use the little left and right arrows at the top left to get back to previous searches.

Wish List
- The ability to ALT+TAB from CoolIris to another application and back. 90% of the time, I have to force FireFox to quit because it becomes unresponsive.
- I would love to search multiple sites at once. I know that can be tricky development, but I’d love it.
- You know everyone wants to save images directly from the CoolIris interface. My suggestion: Allow us to set up a default download directory and then add a watermark in the bottom right corner (maybe a little floppy disk icon?) that, when clicked, drops the full-size version of that image in my download folder.

Finally, CoolIris for my iPhone?
CoolIris finally came out with an iPhone application bearing their name and, well, coolness.

The basics work pretty much like it’s big brother. You can browse or search images, scroll with a thumb-flick, and email the ones you like to a friend or just visit the image’s page directly. The iPhone version has a few glaring empty spots where you might expect to search YouTube or shop like you can with its desktop counterpart, but it’s still the coolest way to find images on your iPhone. If you have any doubts, search for that perfect iPhone wallpaper with it.