NY Times introduces photo tumbler

Here’s a reason to hate working on a laptop with a small screen: The New York Times has a Tumblr called “The Lively Morgue,” through which you can scroll big, beautiful pages from the paper’s archives.

The first post, from sometime on Monday, shows Times employees in aprons sorting photos into baskets labeled “Bombay,” “Melbourne,” “Copenhagen,” and so forth. It’s undated. In an introductory essay, David W. Dunlap writes “let’s agree that these photographs give lie to the idea that The New York Times is not a picture newspaper.”

Contemplating the size of the Times’ collection, Dunlap writes: “If we posted 10 new archival pictures every weekday on Tumblr, just from our print collection, we wouldn’t have the whole thing online until the year 3935.”

Some pictures are for sale; the paper’s Lens blog will write about others. On that blog, Kerri MacDonald writes that Darcy Eveleigh has been choosing images for The Lively Morgue for months.

Tbis is neat: Clicking the photos turns them over so you can see the notations on the back.