NY Times Working on Adding Photo Credits and Captions to iPhone App
As media organizations have rolled out apps for the iPhone and other smart phones, their treatment of photographic content (and those who create it) has varied.
A programming glitch has thus far prevented the New York Times from including photo credits and captions with the photographs that appear at the top of articles in their iPhone app. “It’s a bug we’re working on fixing,” the Times’ deputy director of photography Beth Flynn told PDN via email.
On other news apps, credits get minimal attention. For example, captions for photographs that accompany BBC News articles in that organization’s iPhone app appear under the image, but the credits, which appear in the bottom corners of the photographs, mimicking the BBC News Web site’s credit treatment, are too small to read.
Captions and credits for images accompanying USA Today articles on that organization’s iPhone app appear when users press on the photographs and enlarge them in a new window. A plus symbol over the lower right corner of the images encourages readers to enlarge them. USA Today also dedicates a section of their app to pictures, with features that include the “Day in Picutres” and “Week in Travel,” but readers must open a caption window to see the credits for those images.
The News section of NPR’s iPhone app functions similarly to USA Today’s, with a plus symbol over the top corner of the images on their site. However, when users enlarge the image, no photo credit appears and any caption running longer than six lines is truncated. NPR photo credits run instead at the end of the article.
Of course, all of the writer credits managed to make it into the apps.
Subscribe to this blog
August 26th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Photo credits exist for two reasons, to give the image more credibility and to help the photographer somehow make more money from their work.
Missing credits puts a stop to any further licensing of an image.
It weaken the prestige of a magazine or newspaper (why hire Mary Ellen Mark if nobody knows?).
It promotes the false premise that anyone with a fancy camera can make these pictures… somehow these snaps just showed up.
The reader is cheated by not being able to dig deeper into the photographer’s work on a certain subject, or even to get a better understanding of what the photographer’s perspective might be.
At this point, with fewer (and shrinking) licensing fees, photographers should be demanding that online photo credits link back to their agency, PhotoShelter, or even a personal website.
In the fifties, photographers fought hard for photo credits, many got black-balled for the effort. Sadly, I doubt will see a similar effort today.