PictoBrowser has a nearly nifty alternative Flash slideshow creature that lets you embed slideshows of things like Flickr sets in posts. The idea is cool (I’m suprised there aren’t more like it), although the particular slideshow doesn’t allow for any useful customization and is a bit awkward to navigate if you have a large set of images. The browser is fixed at 500 pixels wide, for example, that that’s just a hair wider than really sits gracefully in this blog layout. I can hack their code to make their Flash thing only 400 pixels wide, but that cuts off the rightmost 100 pixels of my pictures, which isn’t cool. So too big it will be, I guess.
Above is a slideshow of my 50 most “interesting” photos on Flickr, as determined by their mysterious algorithmic special sauce.
What’s potentially really cool about this, though, is their distribution mechanism. If you want to make a slide show of your own, you can just click the “INFO” link on the bottom right of the slide show, and right there you’ll be able to make and preview your own shows, and get the HTML necessary to embed them in your own stuff. You never need to visit their site or Flickr or anything else – it all happens right here.
One could argue that ease of embedding is an increasingly key feature of web toys. I’ll bet, for example, that it certainly hasn’t hurt YouTube that they make it so easy to embed videos in your own stuff instead of requiring people to come to their site. It’s mildly annoying that Flickr only provides you with embedding HTML for you own images, and not for other people’s, even when those people have made the images “bloggable” and/or provided CreativeCommons licenses for them.
Via a del.icio.us link from mitten.
