Does anyone know why EC has stopped doing those fabulous photo galleries every few days from the Tour? They were always so good and something I truly looked forward to. It really gave a feel to how such talented photographers brought all aspects of the race to us. Almost 1/2 way in and no galleries!
You must really be missing them to have asked twice ![]()
Also disappointed with the coverage. Very little tech galaries.
I don’t have any involvement with our editorial planning, but I can speak to this generally and historically.
I remember back at CyclingTips I always wondered why cyclingnews, velonews, etc had all their tiny photos at a low-res pixelated 600px wide. When I saw the Boston Globe’s Big Picture it blew my mind. Straight away I went and made all the photos on CT full screen width, and I figured others would start doing this. But they didn’t.
CT became known for it’s photography and how we showcased it. The photographers loved seeing their work in this format as well. We used to do a massive photo gallery after every stage of the TdF and other races. Then instagram came along…
Ever since, we’ve seen the popularity of our photo galleries fall off a steep cliff. Also, mobile usage became the predominant way of consuming our content and big photos no longer had the same impact. These went from being our most popular posts, to some of our least.
Depending on the photographer, we have usage limits that we need to be careful of, and with barely anyone viewing these anymore, it’s not often then it’s worth putting a photo gallery (which takes a day or two of manually selecting, captioning, etc the photos) together unless there’s a strong visual story to be told. Strade Bianche, Paris Roubaix etc are some of these. I’m guessing we’ll do a TdF photo gallery or two at some point which will be really good, but not every stage like we used to do.
That’s disappointing, cycling makes for such great pictures especially with those photographers that looking at them on a phone is like letting a delicious meal go cold and reheating in a microwave.
But understandable, given that people can’t seem to do anything without a phone in their hand
Disappointing but understandable. I’m not on Instagram, so that’s out for me, and if I were reading EC on my phone and saw that there was a big photo gallery, I would get up and go to my computer to take it in.