Small Business Website: Easy Image Searching

Just a quick post from me this time, as this is something I’ve been meaning to get on the blog for a while. As a web developer, I’m always on the lookout for a fast and reliable source of image files for our small business clients’ websites. Flickr is a great resource for free and commercially usable images, but trolling through pages and pages of mis-tagged files can become tedious. As a result, I often find myself falling back on the always dependable Google image search to find relevant and appealing photos.

Like Flickr though, I don’t always enjoy flipping through page after page of Google images that are seemingly irrelevant to my search. Thankfully, there’s a fantastic piece of browser software that makes Google image searching not only painless, but almost even enjoyable: Cooliris.

Cooliris is a browser plugin available for Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox (my personal favorite). While it has a bunch of cool features for web users, the “Cooliris Wall” is what can really benefit web developers and small business website owners. Instead of displaying static pages of images like Google search results that you have to click through page after page of, Cooliris creates an infinite image wall. This wall allows you to literally load hundreds of images at a time that you can quickly scroll through, zoom in and out, and download.

If you have a small business website with a photo gallery to display, you can even embed a Cooliris wall on your site and point it to your custom image content on a photo sharing site like Flickr or Picasa. This gives your site a professional finish and a great intuitive interface for your users to navigate through your images. Even if you’re not a developer, it’s worth checking out.