Cooliris Photo & Video Gallery
I ran across Cooliris when shopping around for a gallery for the Eagle Sky project. I don’t recall how it happened, whether I was using Stumble Upon, or if it was just chance, but I remember the feeling when I got there. I had spent hours mucking around in other galleries trying to make them fit my needs, but they all fell short in one way or another. I was only a few days from buying a gallery when I discovered Cooliris, and I think it put me on the edge of my seat for the next four hours. Cooliris had everything I needed:
- Embeddable Wall
- Slideshow
- Zoom
- Meta Data
and more:
- Full Screen Ability
- Live Feed Via RSS
- Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook Integration
- FLV Video Integration
check out this sample feed
I knew nothing about RSS feeds at the time, but the documentation at Cooliris was all very straightforward, so I didn’t run into any walls through the process. I got it up and running, and integrated into the website in a few hours. Here is how….
PicLens Publisher
Don’t know how to make an RSS feed for your pictures? Cooliris provides a small app that will do it for you, and created all the required thumbnails as well. All you have to do is run PicLens, then FTP the folders it creates to your website, and point your gallery to the .rss file in those folders.
OR, Cooliris supports streaming your pictures from Picasa or Flikr if you prefer that route.
Cooliris Plugin
You may notice that Cooliris pushes their browser plugin, which by the way is definitely worth having, but the embeddable gallery does not require users to have the plugin. It does however add 3D functionality and effects to your wall if they do have the plugin installed.
