Thanks for the Reuters collection for comparison.

I disagree that that's a better collection, on a number of counts:

1. The presentation is a fixed-size image on the page, which cannot be maximised (or the controls for such maximisation are highly nonobvious). Which means that I'm seeing a roughly 1/4 size image with vastly less detail than in the Imgur collection.

2. Despite what is clearly access to an arial vehicle (probably a helicopter), the Reuters images present a much smaller set of viewpoints, perspectives, and scales. The flexibility of a drone to go virtually anywhere within the area of interest, the specific focus on both the main spillway and the emergency overflow, the massive erosion along the latter, and the ability to either move in (not just zoom in via lens), or back out for an overview, is highly apparent in the Imgur photosets.

3. By contrast, the drone images provide a range of perspectives, sightlines, an distances from the subject, giving a much better overview of the full scope of the incident.

4. The Reuters images are static, not animated. Whilst I'm among the first to agree that animations can be, and are, overused, their use to show dynamic changes or events is exceedingly useful, and used to exceedingly good effect in the Imgur set.

5. Several of the Imgur images (you have to expand to see the full set) do show the extreme extent of the damage, including the void carved out below the initial failure, the gully formed by the free-flowing water, and the damage downstream of the spillway collapse showing visible rebar at the spillway lip, erosion of that lip, damage to the water diverting teeth at the bottom of the spillway, and several sections of channel wall which have been destroyed upstream of the lip. Also shown are multiple shots with humans visible for scale (and a banana).

6. The captioning of the Imgur slides is far more descriptive than those of the Reuters shots. Passive voice is avoided in the Imgur captions. Because passively voicing your captions is not only dry as fuck but creates a massive tendency to eliminate virtually any informative value from those captions.

7. Finally, the Imgur collection can be contrasted with the imagery which typically accompanies news stories: close-in shots generally of either emergency workers, evacuees, or onlookers, with little or no contextualisation of the larger picture. If you're exceedingly lucky, a small line map with minimal detail may be provided, showing approximate locations, but virtually nothing of interest as to the situation or considerations of the scene or its larger surroundings. For broad-scale disasters (fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes), there's almost never a map showing extents, damage, or more critically, safe evacuation zones in the immediate vicinity of an event. This is where I've found Wikipedia to be almost without exception the single best source of information an overview of an ongoing event, in that it synthesises the overall understanding of an event to that point in time, rather than providing a drip of what is almost always very little news, that entirely uncontextualised, and in broadcast media, an absolutely insane amount of space-filling tap dancing and repetition.

My vote goes with the Imgur collection.

Incidentally, Imgur allows animations to be stopped, via most clients, by clicking the image or the animation controls themselves. You don't have to leave them running. I also find muliple simultaneous animations distracting.