So I played with this a bit. It feels great to me. The red highlighting around the box really makes it work.

Then I went back and played with the previous example. I found that I got really annoyed by the text boxes sliding in and covering up part of the image. The top version (with the text at the side) felt much better to me.

This is different from how I felt the first time, but again, the size of the text I think makes a real difference – I’m on a different screen at the moment, and the smaller text is easier to read.