Time and time again we've been struck by how stuck in the mud Craigslist is. On one hand this is completely nice, in that American Gothic, old-timey, nothing ever changes way. Yet on the other hand there are some really useful features that could be added. For example, it seems crazy that we can't easily filter the list of for sale items by those which have pictures. No offense to bicycle die hards, but 2005 Santa Cruz XL black anodized BLUR LT with fox float rp3 means absolutely nothing to us without a picture.

Fortunately some people with a lot more time on their hands and who are way more intelligent than us have fixed this issue. Coming to our rescue is a website called listpic which does exactly what it says -- it lists the pictures on Craigslist. This site is simply a front end to Craigslist's housing, for sale and some of the personal sections, allowing you to search, look at different ads, all the normal stuff, but at the same time

Next time we are looking for a bike? We'll head to listpic's bicycle section and browse the images.

A couple things to keep in mind. The first is that the site can be quite slow, it seems to be reloading all the images from Craigslist dynamically as you ask for them. Secondly, while we like the idea of looking for housing by picture, it would be useful to be able to put a filter on by rental amount as well as put the location somewhere in the add. (The last hour we've spent clicking on new places to live only to find out that they are in Pacifica probably could have been spent more productively) The site also provides a link for each picture within an entry, so if a listing has 3 pictures, it will appear three times. And last but not least, listpic only seems to show entries that have pictures, so if you are searching for that one of a kind Eve of Milady Wedding gown and it doesn't have a picture... Well, you're out of luck.

Image from http://listpic.com

showing the pictures with the listings.