Add Cooliris to your Firefox Web browser to get a new way of viewing many photos at once on selected sites. Supported sites include Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, Google Images, and others. On those sites, if you mouseover a photo you'll see a small play button in the lower left of the image.

Click that button to get the Cooliris photo display, a 3D-animated presentation screen with a wall of thumbnails for all the pics on the page you started on. You can shift left and right through the wall using a box at the bottom of the display.

Clicking a given thumbnail zooms in on that image. Double-clicking brings it up full-screen, with controls and image thumbnails at the bottom. The controls, which allow for starting a slideshow or moving back and forthe through the thumbnails, auto-hide after a few seconds of activity. Double-clicking an image takes you back to the thumbnail view. To exit Cooliris, you can hit Esc or the program close button in the upper-right of the display.

If you ever view photos on the supported sites, give CoolIris a whirl. It's not often that an applet makes something more glitzy and more efficient at the same time.

Note: Clicking the download link takes you to the Cooliris Firefox Add-on page, which has a link to install the extension directly into your browser.

-- Erik Larkin