App of the week for journalists: Beamr, for sending photos

App of the week: Beamr

Devices: iPhone

Cost: free

What is it? An iPhone app that reduces the file size of photos allowing you to transfer a collection of photos quickly without impairing the quality.

How is it of use to journalists? If you take photos on your iPhone and want to send them to your newsdesk, one way is to click on each photo individually and share by email.

Beamr offers an alternative. The app could save you time, especially when your data connection is not that strong, and if you pay for data transfer, it could save you money.

The free app allows you to add photos from your iPhone's camera roll, creating a magazine with text. You may not want to use this magazine function for creating a nice looking collection of images, but it does allow you to package up images and send them quickly and efficiently.



When you click on the 'share photos' function, you can send a link to a downloadable zip file of the photos by email, SMS, Twitter or Facebook. The recipient can then click on the link (such as the link for this test Beamr magazine), hover over a photo and click the logo with two arrows which then shows a download icon.

Beamr states that its technology works by reducing the file size without impairing the quality of the image.

We carried out a test. The image on the left is the original image shot on an iPhone and emailed to a computer in the usual way. The image is 2.3MB. The image on the right was added to the Beamr app and shared within a Beamr magazine. The image is 765KB. We've enlarged the image and we could not tell the difference between the original photo and the Beamr image.



For more on Beamr's technology see this news story.

Have you got a favourite app that you use as a journalist? Fill in this form to nominate an app for Journalism.co.uk’s app of the week for journalists.

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