There are many apps available to serve tech-savvy journalist’s daily needs. But there are never too many, so it’s a good habit to take advantage of any relevant to our work, like this one.
In October 2020 French IT-developer Cyril Diagne released a beta version of ClipDrop, an application that turns your smartphone’s camera into a tool for ‘cutting’ objects from the real world and ‘transferring’ them straight to your desktop screen. Besides the pure joy of watching these magic transformations, ClipDrop can benefit your journalism — now you only need a couple of minutes to turn your feature picture into a sophisticated collage or rework an article’s boring snippet into a customised masterpiece.
How it works
ClipDrop automatically removes the background from any subject and allows you simply drag&drop it to your laptop or save in your camera roll. To kick off you need to download app both to your smartphone and to your computer, and then log into one account. On the desktop, your pictures appear in .png format and can be imported into Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator (where ClipDrop has a plugin available), PowerPoint, Canva and Google Docs. Developers say the app is also good in scanning text from pages.
The app is now available for Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS. A trial period allows you to cut five objects for free; full access to all features on all platforms will cost $80 a year.
Russian journalist with a weighty news background exploring digital tools at City University.