Easily Browse Photos on iPhone with Cooliris

03.01.2009
provides quick and free access to videos and photos from sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Smugmug and others. You can finger-flick though the landscape-view grid of thumbnails until something catches your eye, and then tap that particular pic or video to zoom in.

It works much like the popular . That zoom-in view displays a caption and link, along with icons to save to your own camera roll (for pictures) or e-mail a link to a friend. Tapping the zoomed-in icon displays the full picture or plays the video in a separate viewer.

You can choose to search for particular media from a range of sites, though you can only search one site at a time. Or you can tap the Discover option to sift through media in a varity of categories, such as Sports, Entertainment news, Cool videos or Wallpapers. It's an efficient approach for wallpapers or other media-only items, but for things like Yahoo news photos it can be a little clunky. You can't get the whole news caption in the Cooliris zoom, and instead have to tap a link to bring up a Web page. For news, you're likely better off going straight to a news site.

If you spend much time browsing photos or videos on the iPhone, then it's worth trying the free Cooliris to see whether its grid display suits your style.