The Firefox add-on Thumbnail Zoom will do the work for you, and works with a lot of the popular image hosting websites out there.  All you need to do is download it, and then get to zooming!

This add-on for the Firefox browser will show you a floating panel with the full size image of whatever the thumbnail is about. You hover over the thumbnail image, and the add-on will take care of the rest of the work for you.

Here are some of the websites the Thumbnail Zoom add-on is confirmed to work with:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Amazon
• Picasa
• Flickr
• LinkedIn
• Hi5
• Twitpic
• deviantART
• PhotoBucket
• Wikipedia

You can also enable or disable each site’s ability to zoom on the thumbnails via the status bar menu (or through the add-on settings).  So if you need to zoom in on thumbnails when on Facebook, but not on Twitter – you have full control.

You can pick up the Thumbnail Zoom add-on from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Facebook seems to quickly be outgrowing the other social networks by leaps and bounds.  It is hard to find a friend that hasn’t switched over to it from the other social networks like MySpace and the like.  So with that said, why not grab a toolbar that will help you get a little more out of your Facebook usage and help you stay connected with your friends even better?

Once you have installed the Facebook Toolbar add-on, you can easily do the following:

Search Facebook from Anywhere – The Search Box allows you to easily search Facebook no matter where you are. Select a friend from the drop-down to go directly to their profile, or hit “enter” to see the search results.

Get Notified – Icons on the toolbar tell you how many new pokes, friend requests, and messages you have. A pop-up will notify you when your friends update their statuses, write a new note or interact with you on Facebook.

Connect with Friends – Click the icon to open the Facebook friends sidebar. You can sort your friends by name or status and easily interact with them and their profiles.

Share Content – The share button lets you share the page that you are currently browsing by sending it to friends or posting it to your profile.

Upload Photos – The upload photos button lets you find photos on your computer, caption and tag them, and upload them to Facebook.

The Facebook Toolbar extension simply put, makes it much easier to integrate all the fun of Facebook into your favorite browser.  You can pick up the add-on via the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Better known as the Facebook Photo Album Downloader, FacePAD will not only let you grab your own photo album, but will also let you download your friends’ photo album, event albums, and group albums with the click of a button. 

Here is a video from the developers on how to use FacePAD:

You can learn more about the add-on and get more help on how to use it via the Firefox Add-ons site.  If you want to backup your Facebook photos or save a few that a friend has uploaded, the Facebook Photo Album Downloader will be a great timesaver for you.

So who really needs Pixlr?  It is a great alternative for us normal people out there who may not need the entire Photoshop suite of tools, just a simple and easy to use editor.  Having it online and with easy access via Firefox makes it an even handier tool for the web developers out there to have access to.  The only thing you need to have to make it work is Flash. 

One more nice feature about the service is it is super quick.  Just playing around with the editor on its own, it loaded up in under two seconds easily.  To pick up the Firefox add-on for Pixlr, go check out the Firefox Add-on site.  To learn more about the Pixlr editor, be sure to visit pixlr.com.

Step 1: Enter about:config into your address bar

Step 2: In the filter box, type in this string:

gfx.color_management.enabled

Step 3: Now toggle that from false to true, and then restart (or close, and then open back up) Firefox.  Your done!  Now where is the catch?  Here is the explanation from Lifehacker:

From there on in, your photo colors will be richer than they were. Why isn’t this value true by default? Well, according to Mozilla, you’ll see a 10-15% performance hit using this setting, but if you’ve got a reasonably fast machine, it’ll be worth the better-looking photos. Hit the link below for an extended explanation of Firefox’s color profile support.

So, the clift notes version would be if you have a slower machine, you may not want to enable this setting.  If you have a powerhouse though, go at it.

This image above should give you a good idea of what you can look forward to once it is enabled.  See how Firefox 3′s color representation and Photoshop are just about the same?  I won’t lie, I am not as up on this color profile information as much as other may be so let me direct you to a great article that tackles this subject even deeper. 

One thing that has always irritated me about looking at pictures on the web is that browsers don’t seem to display photographs properly. And by “photographs” I really mean “colors”. I spend a lot of time tweaking pictures in Photoshop, but when I upload them to my Flickr account and look at them in Firefox 2 the colors aren’t the same — they’re more washed out, dull, and lifeless. It’s a subtle thing, but annoying nonetheless.

You can check more out about Firefox 3′s color profile support and what to look forward to on Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors) (a great article by the way) via dria.org.

Image Toolbar – get that old IE6 hover-over toolbar on Firefox. You know the one that used to let you save, coy, print and more? Yeah I try to block using Internet Explorer out of my mind too.

Image Zoom – Allows you to zoom in on images to get a closer look. Of course, you still face the eventual pixelation of the image, but nice to have if you don’t want to export the image to an image editor.

PicLens – This is my favorite of the “view your images in a new way” extensions. PicLens instantly transforms your browser into an full-screen slideshow experience. It also comes with support for Flickr, Facebook and Google Images right out of the box.

Open Image In New Tab – I bet you can’t figure out what this extension does. If you said “washes the car” you would be wrong my friend. Get a new right-click menu option to open your images in a new tab. Yes, it really is that simple.

Have any other image extensions that deserve my attention?

Confused yet? Picnik is a really cool web site that allows you to edit your photos Online. Now when you mix that with the awesomeness that is Firefox – you have in your hands one heck of a nice tool.

Add a menu options and a toolbar icon to make importing images into Picnik easier. This extension adds a menu option when you right click on images to make it easy to pull the image into Picnik for editing. Firefox 2.0 users also menu options and a toolbar icon to take screen shots and import them into Picnik.

The thing that brings the magic together is the Picnik extension for Firefox. Might not be the time to uninstall Photoshop just yet – but give it some time and you might re-think that idea.

Here’s a link to the offical web site for more information:
http://www.foxsaver.com/

Overall I’d say this is a neat idea for a Firefox addon, but not sure if it is useful just yet. They do have a big selection of neat photos – but i would really like to add my own – or have it pick up on my Flickr account (or insert your favorite photo host here.) Do you think this extension shows promise too?

Here are some of the currently supported web sites: Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Friendster, Picasa Web Albums, and more!

Here is a little more about the extension from the developers:

the plug-in provides an immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the Web. PicLens Beta 1.5 can be used on Flickr, Facebook, and image search results from Google and Yahoo, and any page that supports Media RSS. To use the software, move your mouse over an image and click the PicLens button that fades in.

I have to say it will be interesting to watch PicLens (pun fully intended there) to see where it goes from here on out.