Journalists often work with photos. Expressing information with new media tools and multimedia projects, as well as traditional online journalism implies the active application of photos and images. 

Besides, a journalist’s professional activity on social networking sites implies extensive work with photos, images, and videos. Today that is the main path of media development. 

Today mobile apps allow those even unfamiliar with creative software to create multimedia content. A number of mobile apps can be very useful for journalists themselves.

Without a doubt, it’s important to distinguish Layout from Instagram, which allows for assembling collages quickly. Of course, we can’t not talk about Picsart, since many in Armenia are familiar with this app and use its many image editing features. 

There’s another app created in Armenia, which isn’t yet well known but can likewise be useful. It’s Pixomatic (Android version here), which not only allows editing photos, but also has very simple tools to create quite complex collages. 

Google has a very simple and practical app for general photo editing and working with images — Snapseed. It allows pure editing without getting distracted by other interesting features. 

Another Google app, Google Street View, allows to create spherical, 360-degree photos, which, for example, can present the scene on the ground more comprehensively.

It’s assumed that in the case of disseminating timely information, to preserve the rules of journalism ethics, the published photos must be edited. For example, the faces of minors must be redacted or be unrecognizable. 

Given the fact that journalists are quick to publish their materials on social media, ObscuraCam allows to quickly blur and disguise people in photos and videos so that they can’t be identified. 

These few apps with their features help journalists make various changes to images within a daily work schedule.

Samvel Martirosyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.