Photobook: Facebook Photos, Straight to your Mac

With the API release and great developer tools of the social networking site Facebook, more and more people have begun to write desktop programs for the platform. I think those of you who use Facebook will agree that you spend the majority of your time on the site stalking looking at pictures of your friends. Photobook, from Caffeinated Software, is a desktop client for doing just that; seeing all your friend’s pictures in one, well designed application.

After signing into your Facebook account, you’ll be greeted with Photobook’s main window. Here you can see the most recent albums that you, your friends, or both have uploaded. Though this menu looks a bit like iPhoto 08’s Events menu, don’t be mistaken; you can’t hover through the album like you can in iLife’s Photo app. You can search through all the albums and photos, those that would be able to see through Facebook, using all the tags or information that the owner of that picture provided. Search results pop up as you type, like in Spotlight or iTunes.

When you click through to an album, you are greeted with all the pictures that comprise that album; the entire set is resizable, like in iPhoto. When you click on the photo, it enlarges with a flourish (”superfluous effects” as it’s known) giving you a full view of the image. On the same panel as the full sized image, you can see all the people tagged in the image and the image’s caption. You can play a slideshow of all the images in the specific album; this experience is similar to basically every other slideshow you’ve ever seen.

Photobook is a free download from Caffeinated Software and requires Tiger or Leopard.

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