CraigsToolbox - Image browser for craigslist

Posted on April 22, 2008 at 5:01 am

Craigslist is a great online emporium. I often sell tech gear and other stuff I no longer need, and I go to Craigslist to check out what other people have for sale that I may want. Who knows, maybe I can pick up an extra SATA disk drive that I can add to my backup farm or perhaps someone is nearly giving away a flat screen monitor so they can make room for something even bigger and better.

What’s a bummer about craigslist though is that when you’re browsing for anything where appearance is critical, you want to check photos before deciding if you’re interested enough to send off an inquiry. You could be looking for a used car, an apartment, maybe even a pet. But craigslist, popular as it may be, does not make it easy to browse ads that have photos.

The closest it comes is to offer the checkbox to show only ads with images when searching. That could still leave you a minor case of carpal tunnel after all that scrolling and clicking to open up each ad.

What you want is a way to quickly browse the ad headlines, along with thumbnails of any photos attached to the ads, in one step. Wouldn’t it then be awesome if you could hover your cursor over a thumbnail while still in full list / browse mode and see a larger image? Wow! My tired fingers are loving the thought of this!

Enter CraigsToolbox. It looks like they are gearing up to release a variety of add-ons for frequent craigslist users, and the first one out of the chute is their Image Preview Extension, a free extension for Firefox that makes checking craigslist a lot more productive.

So if you’re a Firefox aficionado as I am, navigate over there and grab the download. If you’re not using Firefox as your main browser but use craigslist a lot, it may still be worth your while to grab both Firefox and this extension to install, even if you just use this for craigslist.

Follow the directions and prompts to install the extension. When you bring Firefox back up, you won’t notice anything changed. This CraigsToolbox extension works behind the scenes - there’s nothing for you to click or configure. But whenever you browse to craigslist and search ad listings, instead of getting this: