New Cooliris mobile app makes photo sharing and viewing a visual feast

The iPad and iPhone’s default photo app works just fine, but it’s plain and boring, like going on date with a pleasant but forgettable partner: Good qualifications, secure desk-bound job, but rigid and humorless.

A new mobile app might shake things up a little. It’s called Cooliris, and it promises to make photo viewing and sharing not just pleasant — but pleasurable. You might have heard of the name before — Cooliris currently exists as a popular browser plugin that converts plain vanilla image pages on sites like Google Image Search, Flickr, and Facebook into flowy 3d slideshows. There’s also an old Cooliris mobile app that’s quite similar to the web plugin.

While the old mobile app is centered about viewing search images, the new version focuses on viewing and sharing personal photos. And yes, the new and free app, available on iPhone and iPad, still retains the same slideshow effect, though it really blossoms on the tablet.

Beyond photos stored on the device, the app also lets you view images on your Facebook albums, Timeline, and newsfeed, as well as photos on Instagram and Google Image Search.

But Cooliris is more than a media consumption app. You can bunch photos together and share them on Facebook Timeline, email them to your friends, or send them to associates who are also on Cooliris.

The app is promising. The user interface is fluid and intuitive, and there’s inexplicable  joy in being able to manipulate photos seamlessly using your fingers — a sensation I can only describe as liberating.

This is certainly a decent first iteration, but I do look forward to more features in the future. Conceivably, Cooliris could become the default app I use to manage my media on mobile devices. What’s lacking now is the freedom to sort photos and create albums, as well as more flexible cross-sharing — I would love to create Facebook albums with Cooliris, or even share photos on Twitter.

Thumbnails for the iPhone app, especially of the Facebook photos, seem a little small. While some incremental improvements can be made, there’s only so much you can do with a limited screen real estate.

 

 

Check out more coverage about Cooliris the company.

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