Photonic Video Review and Giveaway
I’m a believer in desktop applications that enhance the online experience. I don’t think that doing everything online in a browser window is the answer to everyone’s computing problems. Instead, having a powerful desktop application that integrates seamlessly with an online service, produces the ideal experience for the user. Photonic brings the photo-sharing site, Flickr, to the desktop, in a beautiful and functional interface that makes interacting with Flickr all the better.
Photonic 1.0 was just released, and allows you to browse Flickr photos fullscreen from your desktop. It’s fast, beautiful, and clean. It caches photos on your computer, and allows you to filter and search through photos. You can add favourites, send FlickrMail to people, or view your contacts photos. Watch some of the major features of Photonic in action in this video review.
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Barton Springs Software, the makers of Photonic, have generously offered 10 licenses of Photonic to giveaway on the blog. All you have to do is leave a comment with one feature that you would like to see in Photonic in the future. The giveaway will end March 17th, and the winner will be announced shortly after. If you don’t win a licenses of Photonic in our giveaway, you can buy one for $20 until March 15th.
For more giveaways and video reviews like this, subscribe to the MacApper Podcast in iTunes and the MacApper RSS feed.
I know it would have reduced functionality but a Tiger version at this stage would be good.
Also a way to search and save by creative commons licence.
A tool to crop 4:3 images to 16:9 or 16:10 would be very nice!
i want some iphoto integration and basic edit tools.
Hi! Great app! But what I would really like to see in future versions is editing titles, tags etc. of photos already uploaded on flickr. Also commenting directly from Photonic would be nice. And maybe some icons because the sidebar looks sad
Hmmm….I second the recommendation for iPhoto integration and comment support.
It would also be cool to support some kind of photo-collage tool that pulls photos with certain tags and creates a composite image.
Great looking app…I can definitely see getting more out of Flickr with this.
I would like to see support for cropping images to normally cropped sizes on the go!
Screen-grab for Flickr upload would be nice. Somewhat similar to Flickscreen app.
Could use this for our middle school. Sounds like a great resource.
I want Aperture 2.0 integration.
“Grab all these pics and upload them to my Flickr account as private images for me to keep”.
To be able to view and make comments would be cool!
One of the greatest things about Flickr is the “social network” aspect. Many times I’ll go to Flickr and look at my contacts latest photos and be pissed that A. I missed a great shot last week B. That these is no better way to look at ALL my contacts photos. An actual photostream view! Can you believe it! Seems obvious…
So when I tried your app I immediately when highlighted “Contacts” in the source column but got nothing. I expected this “view” to show me the above.
That’s my feature request!
Integration with iPhoto would be awesome. Also (I guess depending on resolution and other things) but a “Set as desktop background” feature could be pretty cool for those time where you find a picture you really like and want it as your background…
I’ve enjoyed using Flickr much more with Photonic. It’s intuitive and easy to use. My most immediate wish is for Photonic to allow me to upload a group of photos in a set created within the app. Later I’d like to have the ability to download sets of photos. Great start.
I third the recommendation for iPhoto/Aperture integration and comment support.
I think that the option to download photos would be awesome.
This is a great app – I would browse the photos on flickr all day, if it weren’t for the pain of having to do it through the internet browser.
Here are a few things I would like to see in Photonic in the future:
- iPhoto integration (even better if you can choose to keep or discard the tags)
- Ability to read and write comments (and maybe the option to turn them off)
- Ability to save photos, and also note where they came from somehow, so it’s easy to know who to credit if you use the photos in graphics or something
- Ability to view the license of photos, and to search for photos with a specific license
I like the geofunctionality of Flickr. Features like geotagging photos and browsing photos with the map interface would be really cool.
Maybe some small editing features and the ability to comment would be nice
There’s also Piclens, a free Firefox extension that allows you to browse Flickr (google images, others) in a kind of 3d interface that supports the Mighty Mouse scrollball – it’s really quite incredible. Fullscreen too.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5579
Enhanced cropping tools would be nice.
My primary goal with flickr is often searching for pictures from Creative Commons to put into presentations or articles.
I would like the ability to do more refined searches in this tool. Perhaps I just can’t figure how to do it, but I would like to have a basic search for all of flickr, not just explore March 9. or my own sets but all of flickr.
it would be so cool to have Photonic running in one window and keynote in another. Type a search term and the CC license “By:”.
And then drag and drog the image directly into Keynote without downloading.
This would be the a total killer app and well worth the license.
I would consider a good downloader to be much worth spending money on, than the uploader part of photonic, where Flickr Uploadr has this basic functionality for free, and solves the problem fairly well.
- Jens Poder
This is a great app. I would love to see webkit integrated so that you don’t have to go out to a browser everytime you link to the Flickr service. Always nice to have everything in one app. There also really needs to be an easy way to create a new photoset. Still, off to a promosing start.
-Ian
Another feature that I can think of is being able to make the window smaller. Right now it runs into the dock on my MacBook. I didn’t know how to edit, so I just made a new comment.
Beeing able to search for pictures by drawing a sketch of what the picture would look like, for example drawing yellow triangles would bring pictures of the pyramids of Egypt, or a white rectangle with a smaller rectangle and a circle inside would bring pictures of an iPod.
I would like to see integration, not just with iphoto and aperture, but also with other social websites like facebook, myspace and bebo. The great thing about these sites is the ability to tap into different aspects of contacts lives, “I like this person’s photos, I want to get to know them better and also know more about their other interests.”
So perhaps the program can search to see if they have accounts on these sites (using the same user name or e-mail) and give the option to add as friends.
Also, the ability to search by colours, not just tags, and details on the copyright so if you’re looking for photos for a project you can get exactly the right shade of blue and know at the same time you’re not breaking any copyright infringement.
A basic curves editing tool would be great, I know this isn’t workflow software, but it would definitely make this a more powerful app overall.
Great review,
Although the current functionality is good, it would be nice to see some integration with other apps (iPhoto, aperture, Grab, etc), the ability to edit already-uploaded photos (e.g. Title, sets, etc), and the ability to search by member name.
iPhoto integration would be a welcome addition (or maybe even plug-ins for other apps?).
The ability to save (possibly crop or edit) your favorite photos in iPhone/iPod Touch size (480×320), perhaps even automatically adding them to iTunes for easy syncing.
1. Being able to bring up the media browser, almost like iphoto’s, and add images to your document, or email photos etc.
2. Being able to get the link of a photo, or email it easily.
3. Probably too niche to be one of your top priorities, but it would be nice to be able to consolidate your other photo accounts into your flickr account, such as photobucket.
4. Might get heat for this, but the ability to backup some of your friends flickr images into your own would be.
5. Batch processes of any kind would be fantastic. Being able to batch resize and save them to a particular directory or something like that.
6. Integration with automator so we could create our own macros would be fantastic as well.
Awesome product, this is precisely what I have been waiting for as long as the editing features are on par with the web interface of Flickr. I HATE batch editing tags etc in Flickr, and being able to do that with locally cached thumbnails would be great. I have 2500 images uploaded, and have been waiting for a client to come out just so I can go through and prune everything…because it is too daunting a task for the web interface.
I have really enjoyed the application. The two things that I would like to see: a button on the interface to refresh the groups and a way to view and interact with the flickr discussions. Thanks.
Would love to see some compatibility with iPhoto, Lightroom or Aperture.
Add PicasaWeb support please. Looks like a very cool app.
The one feature I’d love to see is having a way to quickly copy some HTML code to embed the picture in my blog!
Features I would like to see included in future updates:
1. Edit features – simple crop and resize functions.
2. Mail interface – similar to iPhoto mail interface when photos are selected.
3. Print options – similar to iPhoto print options when photos are selected.
4. “Blog This” interface – similar to Flickr “Blog This” interface.
5. Flickr Map integration – with the new Flickr Photo Map, I would like to view my contacts photomap (under Contacts) or at least include a “Flickr Map” button (suggested location: besides the “Star Rating” button) that links to a Flickr Map page by user account.
6. Fullscreen view – current fullscreen can be improved to include PicLens-style image browsing experience or slideshow option with timer control.
7. Under Explore – when I am exploring someone’s else photos and if I like a particular shot and I want to find out more information how the shot was taken, I would have to “right-click” and select “Go to Flickr Page” and click on “More Properties” under “Additional Information”. If there is a way to shortcut this process by adding a contextual menu item “Go to Image Properties”, that would be nice.
This last point is a query – I tried uploading a photo and added some tags but I noticed that the tags did not appear on my Flickr page after uploading. Not sure if others have similar experience.
I would really like it to be able to create a new set when I go to upload a photo. Usually I upload pictures in batches and instead of tagging them like I should, I generally put them in their own set.
Tiger….
And the winners are…
[...] couple weeks ago I reviewed Photonic, a new application that allows you to interact with Flickr from your desktop. Thanks to [...]
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