Sites & Photos - A Website Review

Access to images of archaeological sites around the world has become easier, with new photo sharing sites such as Flickr and StockXchng; but while those images are suitable for web use, the photo quality is not what is required for many academic and business uses. Sites & Photos is a media bank of high quality, high resolution images in detailed, well-researched collections of archaeological sites and artifacts.

The media bank website called Sites & Photos is a collection of photographs and videos of archaeological ruins and architecture throughout the Mediterranean region. Over 80,000 high resolution images and over 20 hours of video clips have been collected for this project to date, and you can see the thumbnails and 10 second video previews without so much as logging in.

The catalog of images at Sites & Photos includes detailed photographs and videos of sites and ruins in Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Turkey, Malta, Israel, Tunisia, and Jordan. Architectural elements and museum artifacts are also online (although permission to sell the museum collection photographs is pending). Some amount of information is available on the sites and cultures of the Mediterranean, although the main resource here is the videos and photographs. The site structure allows the user to scan the collections for a given country or archaeological site, and the key worded catalog allows you to search for cross-cultural or international elements, such as burials and mosques, or search on a site name.

To gain access to the high resolution images, you must register and log in, a process that while free is fairly detailed, and for an excellent reason--the high resolution images and videos must be purchased prior to download. The prices, frankly, are outside of an unaffiliated web master's budget; but the audience for this site is the academic and business user--many of the photos are of a resolution and quality that could be used by businesses looking to illustrate brochures or advertising copy. For those kinds of uses, the prices seem reasonable. Images are provided both royalty free and rights-managed; both categories have fees attached to them, but the rights-managed includes pricing based on length of time and purpose of use.

The best thing, hands down, about Sites & Photos comes with an 'academic subscription'. For a flat annual fee (determined in part by the country of origin), faculty members and students at a university may download all the videos and images up to 1200x1200 pixel size, for non-publication uses (including conference presentations, teaching purposes, student projects and intranet websites). Additionally, Sites & Photos has a 'presentation' tool, that allows a teacher or student to quickly and easily prepare a slide presentation, selecting images and video from the catalog, dropping them into the tool, and providing each page a title and text. The lecturer can then run the created presentation from the website using a wired laptop, as if it were a Power Point slide show. Most usefully, the presentation tool allows the lecturer to zoom into the photographs during a live presentation; the resolution of the photographs allows a quite detailed examination of each photo.

The lead archaeologist at Sites & Photos is Shmulik Magal; Reut Ltd., a software company based in Israel, provides the software support to a staff of nine including researchers, photographers, image editors and archivists. Although the site went live in March of 2006, it is based on nearly a decade of research and photography, principally by Magal. Future plans for Sites & Photos are to complete work in the Mediterranean this year, then move on to Europe, Central and South America and finally Asia.

Bottom Line

Although some elements are not as yet fully operational, in my opinion Sites & Photos would be a wonderful resource for students, educators, and researchers of the Mediterranean region. The photos are of high quality, with resolutions up to 6000x6000 pixels. The catalog is key worded and the search engine works very well (although it was occasionally down for maintenance during my review). The range and detail presented of various sites and cultures researched and photographed to date is quite impressive. The presentation tool available with the academic subscription is an exceptional innovation and I found it quite easy to use.

As an information tool for students, the site is less useful--although numerous detailed photographs have been taken of important archaeological sites, additional information beyond the site name and date of occupation is rarely identified. But as a research image repository for students and teachers, the photographic collections at Sites & Photos are unparalleled and well worth exploring.