Local browsing with CoolIris
UPDATE: You can simply use CoolIris 1.10 for the same purpsose
Full-Screen, 3D — Cooliris transforms your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to browse online photos and videos. Our “3D Wall” lets you fly through thousands of items in the blink of an eye on an infinitely expandable wall. To enjoy Cooliris on Google Images, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and hundreds of other sites, click the Cooliris icon that appears when you mouse over media on the supported site. Or enjoy Cooliris anytime by clicking the browser toolbar icon. See http://www.cooliris.com/product for details.
I was looking for an app that let me browse through my image gallery Apple style – PhotoFlip™, but there seems to be none, unless I download Safari :-/. I don’t want a new browser right now, so I turned to the next best thing: CoolIris. Somehow I vividly recall this is a project started from Microsoft Research but I can’t find any trace of Microsoft there. Maybe the Cooliris team doesn’t like Microsoft in the end. 😛
Well, at least I expected it to be able to automatically detect links to picture on a page and then let me view them. It supported Flickr and Google Images off-screen loading, which is much more complicated than a list.
What a shame it doesn’t.
I’m not the only person looking for a “standalone CoolIris” to view my files, the CoolIris forum is filled with similar requests but the best response they can give is “wait” and an “CoolIris Lite” in which the effect is much simple and you seems to have to add files manually.
No problem, I can fix that.
I tried the “quick” option from the developer’s site but that turned out to be the more complicated option since I have to generate both the expression and the gallery for it to work, so I tried the full option: I created a C# application that will read files from the directory you want, write two files “media.htm” and “media.rss” to the output directory.
- Media.htm contains one picture to activate the CoolIris icon on the toolbar, links to media.rss.
- Media.rss is the feed that lists the files which will let CoolIris know the full list of images.
The core part of the application follows
// Read jpg and jpeg from target directory
string[] Files = Directory.GetFiles(textBox1.Text, "*.jp*");
// Prepare the feed
StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(textBox2.Text + "media.rss");
writer.WriteLine("<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>");
writer.WriteLine("<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">");
writer.WriteLine("<channel>");
writer.WriteLine("<title>Generated photos</title>");
writer.WriteLine("<link>file:///" + textBox2.Text.Replace("\","/") + "</link>");
writer.WriteLine("<description>Photos from my trip to Africa.</description>");
int Counter = 1;
foreach (string FileName in Files)
{
FileInfo Item = new FileInfo(FileName);
writer.WriteLine("<item>");
writer.WriteLine(" <title>" + Item.Name + "</title>");
writer.WriteLine(" <link>" + "file:///" + FileName.Replace("\","/") + "</link>");
writer.WriteLine(" <guid>img " + Counter.ToString() + "</guid>");
writer.WriteLine(" <media:description>" + Item.Name + "</media:description>");
writer.WriteLine(" <media:thumbnail url="file:///" + FileName.Replace("\","/") + "" />");
writer.WriteLine(" <media:content url="file:///" + FileName.Replace("\","/") + "" type="image/jpeg" />");
writer.WriteLine(" </item>");
writer.WriteLine("");
}
writer.WriteLine("</channel>");
writer.WriteLine("</rss>");
writer.Close();
//Prepare the HTML file
writer = new StreamWriter(textBox2.Text + "media.htm");
writer.WriteLine("<html>");
writer.WriteLine(" <head>");
writer.WriteLine(" <link rel="alternate" href="media.rss" type="application/rss+xml" title="" id="gallery" />");
writer.WriteLine(" </head>");
writer.WriteLine(" <body>");
foreach (string FileName in Files)
{
FileInfo Item = new FileInfo(FileName);
writer.WriteLine("<a href="" + "file:///" + FileName.Replace("\", "/") + "">");
writer.WriteLine("<img alt="[Image]" src="" + "file:///" + FileName.Replace("\", "/") + "" class="photo">");
writer.WriteLine("</a>");
break;
}
writer.WriteLine(" </body>");
writer.WriteLine("<html>");
writer.Close();
//Open the HTML file with the default browser, hopefully it's the one with CoolIris installed
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(textBox2.Text + "media.htm");
Application interface
Fill in the directory containing the pictures you want to view in the first text box, the second could be your temp directory. Click generate to generate the files mentioned above and open them in your default browser, click the CoolIris to activate CoolIris (this extra step is required because I don’t know how to call CoolIris on a file directly; the “Launch CoolIris” application seems to open Cooliris.com only).
I also made a command line interface with which you can call the app with 2 parameters. The first will go to “Directory” and the second to “Output”. If you run the app this way it will generate, open the file and then close itself.
Result
Requirements:
- .NET Framework 2.0
- CoolIris enabled browser