onfocus

Ha - I'm working on an iPad version of Big Picture, still working out if it'll be an iPad-aware web version or a standalone app (the difference mostly being packaging, right?) Was disappointed to see how Big Picture renders (or fails) on iPad Safari. Too many big images makes it fail after about 20+ photos. It's under way, though.

If someone did what you're requesting, it'd likely be a multipage scraper service of sorts, since most of the galleries that show multiple photos don't have full RSS feeds (that I'm aware of)

Flickr should totally do this. Most Flickr photos already have a large 1024px wide option that would work perfectly on an iPad.

I suppose I should try making a HTML5 version of http://tenyearsofmylife.com that looks something like this.

Great to hear, Alan. Looking forward to that.

And yeah, Flickr, especially since their existing full screen slideshows don't work on the iPad. I hope people do play with this format, but it'd be a shame for everyone who publishes photos to build their own application. And then a shame for me to install dozens of them.

Understood on scraping, but I could get by with what's available via feeds now. I don't mind the little Canon ad that appears/disappears along with the captions in the Guardian application. If you could add a new media type to Atom/RSS for that kind of overlay it might help people move more content to feeds for this dream image reader.

There really are a dearth of image-viewing apps for the iPad, which is shocking since it seems to (a) be marketed in part as an image-viewing device (hence the whole picture-frame-while-locked functionality), and (b) would be a terrific device for it even if it weren't marketed that way. For example, I'm fairly stunned that there's no reasonable Flickr app out there... the ones I've tried all limit their reach (e.g., they only show the Interesting photos as chosen by Flickr, or they only let you pull in pictures from specific sets of your own, or whatever), and don't let you just view your photostream in a way that's optimized for the iPad.

Alan, and anyone else that's listening, please ALSO include functionality in your app that lets users copy photos from the app into their photo libraries! This is the only way that users could then use the photos as their wallpaper/lock screen, or email them to others. The only even half-reasonable Flickr app I've found -- Photo Pad -- fails miserably at this point, meaning that it allows me to view my own Flickr photos but not then USE them in any way outside of the app. Frustrating.