Very, very simple noobie question about displaying text

I'm working on a project that queries an API for imagery and displays the resultant thumbnails. I'm using a UnityWebRequest to load the pngs as textures, and then set them on a GameObject that has nothing but a Sprite Renderer component:



Very happy with myself, did it all in a couple of hours. The next step is, I need want to display a frame around each image, and I need to show a time stamp and ID, probably underneath each image. The web developer in me cannot get div's and css out of my head and I can't get my brain to turn the corner and understand how to do this in Unity.

I'm assuming to accomplish this I would need a parent GO and have a child GO for each item i want to display -- the sprite, the id, the timestamp, etc. However, do I need a full blown model for this? Can I have like a bunch of mini UI's or something, where I can lay out text areas etc?

And as a stretch goal..... i had each one of those image "LookAt" the main camera position. My real goal is to have the images positioned on a sphere, so that they surround you and you can spin in a circle and look at all of them, but probably only about 3 images high like I have now (eg, you don't have to look up or down to see the other images). I'm also uncertain how to achieve this, unless I do some sort of spherical coordinate conversion or something? But I'd love any advice! Thanks!

 

Make an object, attach world space canvas to it, place a text label into it, and that would be it.

FOr "looking at" camera position, you'd need to write a script which orients the model from within LateUpdate call.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.ugui@1.0/manual/UICanvas.html

Yes, you need game objects, no you don't need models.