report from the motherplanet

Images + Text = News. March 16, 2006

The YAHOO! News Photo Highlights bring together a variety of news from different sources such as Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. This gallery is loaded with pictures which would be way too much for a single-story package; but since the gallery works more like a multi-story package and displays a variety of short news stories, the high number of images makes sense. Besides, it’s possible to view multiple pictures at once and then choose a single photo to get to know more about it; photo captions give the most important information – the who?, what?, when? and where? of the picture – and take the form of a newsflash. What I like about this gallery is that it’s compact but not complicated. One can manually ‘flip’ through the pics or select a speed and view it as a slideshow; photos can be e-mailed, printed, and recommended; they have ratings and a link to related photos. In additon, Yahoo! provides RSS feeds, links to more slideshows (which are sorted by category) and, last but not least, slideshows can be added to My Yahoo! 

Life in the Googleplex is a Time magazine photo essay. I like that the Time photo stories have a title page and keep the title and subtitle, or headline and subhead if you will, throughout the story. This gallery provides information on just one topic; it uses a reasonable number of pictures and keeps the photo captions short and precise. The bold at the start of each caption serves as a picture title which works great textually as well as visually. I also like the size of the pictures (which can be e-mailed). Also, the gallery provides quick links to other sections of Time magazine; the red navigation bar at the top (which includes a search field) and the red bar at the bottom provide a great frame for the photo and its caption.

Finally, I chose the Maverick’s 2006 gallery by the San Francisco Chronicle simply for its amazing pictures. Those waves and those colors … wow! … I’m glad that the rest is kept simple. This gallery really shows how important the quality of the pictures is. Great photos, simple but informative captions, photo credit … done. I also love the thumbnails to the right and find myself using them a lot (instead of the previous and next at the top of the picture).