Getty Images Launches 27Letters: Talking in Pictures

Provided as a full-screen application or widget for Mac users, or just as an app for Windows, 27Letters attempts to feature images from 250 "mainstream media sites and opinion-forming blogs." Rather than displaying the most popular photos, its ambitious goal is to every few days feature "the most used, referenced and talked about" images in a wide range of categories. How it does this, whether hand-picked by humans or via algorithm, is not made clear but the breadth of imagery is so far quite diverse.

The interface is slick, with floating boxes each devoted to a letter of the alphabet. I started out with E is for Extra Dimensional Artforms. Clicking the Source link for that leads to a YouTube video about 3D televisions. Zooming out then shuffles things around so that E was then represented by Exposure and Time, which linked to The New York Times photography blog. Once in a while (surprise!) a link will lead to a photo on the Getty Images site but thankfully this isn't overdone.

All in all, 27Letters winds up being a mildly diverting way to discover new sites and different approaches to using imagery, and there's nothing wrong with that.

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Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com