Searching for images to use on a website or other design is a time consuming process. As you search pages of images you want to be able to grab likely candidates easily and then review them later to choose the best ones.

Lightboxr provides a “visual” bookmarking system that allows you to organise and arrange thumbnail images and then click on them to go to the actual flickr page when you want to. This connection to flickr.comalso allows the system to show additional information associated with images and even generate output for batches of photos so you can easily use them in your web page or other designs.

Faster searching ↑top

Flickr is great for browsing and exploring other people’s photos. But if you want to search for something specific, starting a search, going through the pages of output and going into the photo pages to find out more details can be very time consuming.

Lightboxr does a number of things to speed up the process. First the advanced search fields are always on the top left of the page so you do not have to navigate to begin a search.

You can choose to have up between 6 and 30 images on a page and can make them as small as the 70x70 square images you see on flickr. If you make your browser window wider, then more images can be shown on each row. All of this means you can see more images at a glance with less scrolling and less clicking to go to the next page.

Info at your fingertips ↑top

You can choose to show or hide the title, owner, license and date taken on the image thumbnails in the search results. Hiding one or more of these means more images fit in less screen space or you can make it visible when that information is of interest when viewing and selecting images.

If you click on an image in the search results, more details for the image are shown in the Picture Info pane on the left-hand sidebar. This allows you to see more information without navigating to the actual flickr page which means you do not loose your place and it is quicker than loading a page.

Better Workflow ↑top

The interface is simple and intuative. You just drag photos from the search results into the boxes (a bit like folders) that you have added to the sidebar, just like copying files to a different folder on your hard disk.

You can easily grab an image and decide if you want to use it or even keep it later.

The same photo can be added to multiple boxes and all photos are kept in your private library.

Once you have collected images you can add notes and ratings, move them between boxes and organise them in any way that is going to help you use or evaluate them.

Easier Output ↑top

The template driven output mechanism allows you to generate a web page and fill it with the images you have chosen. This brings all the bits of information you need together in one place in just a few clicks of the mouse.

This is ideal for creating a photo credits page for a website where you give the details legally required by the Creative Commons license.