The Boston Globe’s Big Picture series is one of the finest example of photojournalism on the Internet. Updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, The Big Picture summarizes major world events in 30 or so large format, high quality pictures with brief captions accompanying each photo.
What makes The Big Picture so effective and so innovative is that it shifts from the typical tiny-sized, slide show or click-through format favored by many news sites. Instead the photos are presented vertically down the screen with minimalist design.
BigPicture Cataloguer is a program that downloads the entire Boston Globe Big Picture photo series and tags each photo with their relevant caption. Now you could save these pictures manually with your browser or use a gallery downloader like NeoDownloader. But you wouldn’t get the captions that come with these pictures. This makes BigPicture Cataloguer really special.
The captions are added to each photo’s metadata and will show up on any image viewer capable of doing so. In Google Picasa for example, it looks fantastic.
It is also worth noting that the program resumes downloading a collection intelligently – if a download of the series is interrupted, you can resume where it left off simply by re-running the program, giving it the same directory to save photos in. The same is true of updating your collection with new photos.
BigPicture Cataloguer is presently available for Windows. Linux and Mac OSX versions are under development. Be aware, that the Big Picture gallery is huge (currently 2GB in size) and the program will attempt the download it all.
P.S: I’m having issues running the program on Windows 7. I have contacted the developer and awaiting his reply. Will update when I receive a response.
Update: It’s working, alright. Don’t know what went wrong.
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