One of the best things about using an iPad is all the great apps that we can run on it. There are excellent apps for just about any purpose you can think of. Better still, there are lots of great free apps for the iPad. Our Best Free iPad App of the Week posts highlight these apps.

This week’s pick is The Wider Image – a superb collection of of photographs from Reuters, one of the world’s leading news agencies. Here’s a little slice of its App Store intro:

The Wider Image is an unprecedented photography experience from Reuters, the world’s largest news agency. Created exclusively for the iPad, this immersive app reimagines news photography to bring images and information to life.

The app is full of stunning photographs from all around the world. Better still, the photos are presented as stories – a handful of images are included in each story, along with plenty of fascinating details on the people, location, and events surrounding them. New stories are added to the app daily.

The stories also include profiles of the great photographers responsible for them. I’m not even a photography hobbyist and I find these profiles interesting – I have to imagine they are gold for those who are big photography enthusiasts.

.You can enjoy the photo stories by just browsing through the main screen, or explore by date, location, photographer, or theme. When viewing images you can tap to see demographic information about the photo’s location.

Of course the photos themselves are spectacular and cover everything from the power of nature to the best of current events and human interest stories.

Here’s an App Store link for The Wider Image.

If you’re after more great free iPad apps, be sure to check out our previous choices for Best Free iPad of the Week. We’ve also recently put together a best of the best of our selections from the last year in a Top 25 Best Free iPad Apps list.