Alan Taylor, who founded The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture blog two and a half years ago, is moving to The Atlantic.

There, he will start a new photo blog called In Focus.

The Globe will keep The Big Picture and find someone else to run it.

“Simply stated, I want to do more with the format,” Taylor wrote on his own blog. “I see many opportunities ahead, and have wanted to do more with the blog for a long time, but have often been constrained by time. As anyone who knows me can tell you, working on the blog was always a passion, but was never my fulltime job. I was hired by the Globe over five years ago as a Web Developer, and part of the agreement to let me run the Big Picture was that I kept doing the other web development that needed to be done. I agreed to that arrangement, and tried my best to make it work, but in the end, it was often unworkable – one or the other job would suffer when there were crunch times.

“I wanted the opportunity to do this – telling news photo stories – as a fulltime job, and the Atlantic has offered that to me, for which I am grateful.”

Kottke.org comments: “Smart move by The Atlantic, which is increasingly looking like one of the media properties that may make a smooth-ish transistion from print to online/app media. As for The Globe, well, I don’t think they quite knew what they had there. Eight million page views per month out of nothing with a less-than-maximal effort…that’s the kind of thing you want to encourage if you’re in the media business.”