And if there’s anything with gloss, shine, and a delicious GUI, it’s the browser enhancing digital-image experience called Cooliris 1.11. A small download at 2.9mb, it’s a free to use (and if you’re a geek, integrate into your website) infinite wall of photos which navigates much like the Coverflow function in iTunes, but sleeker and sexier.

And its ruining my web-viewing experience. I checked out Derek’s fine E-P1 shots using Cooliris (by navigating to the set page in Flickr and booting Cooliris from the bouncing logo) and everything was smooth, intuitive, and shiny. Clicking an image brings up any tags or details and the scroll wheel zooms away from the highlighted image so you can click and drag to scroll the wall. It doesn’t integrate image saving or EXIF data, so be a dweeb and sign up to be an alpha/beta tester. The whole of it will massage your eyeballs and immerse your attention.

When I closed Cooliris the standard index of 75×75 pixel thumbnails, frozen as next-year’s fruit-cake, actually confused me for a moment.

It’s not that Flickr has a bad built-in slide show function. It’s tidy and well behaved, like it should be wearing a dark, wool business suit. Cooliris is wearing a slinky dress and a lamp-shade, and probably isn’t measuring the drinks.

So other than ocular hedonists, what use is Cooliris? For a photog with a limited budget (OK, so all budgets that aren’t spawned by the House and Senate are limited) or wants to display their work online with a lot of panache and not a lot of coding -Cooliris is certainly something to consider.