four note friday 2.6 | Photovoice Apps, Part 2

This post is the second part of a two-part series focused on photovoice apps—or Googling the phrase photovoice apps. In last week's post, I focused on EthOS, Indeemo, PhotoVoice Connect, and Instagram as potential technology platforms (i.e., apps, at least in some cases) viable for hosting photovoice projects, with some important caveats.

And while working on last week's post, I came across this page on the Indeemo site, which showcases published works based on research projects in which Indeemo was used.

So for this week's post, I want to focus on my take-aways from reviewing these pieces. They will comprise my four notes.

Also, I was not able to locate any peer-reviewed journal articles in which Indeemo (or EthOS) were leveraged in service of a photovoice project. While such a project could exist, I did not locate any examples in the literature. And I certainly looked beyond the page hyperlinked above, though that is where I will focus for this post.

Of the 12 publications and articles linked on the page, four appeared to be peer-reviewed journal articles and eight appeared to be non-peer-reviewed publications. In addition, two of the linked were broken.

I focused my take-aways on the four peer-reviewed journal articles.

Here are links to each of the journal articles:

https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2025.2603298 (Fawkes et al., 2025)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566632300106X (Kemper et al., 2023)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296325002036 (Relja et al., 2025)

https://doi.org/10.32890/jdsd2023.1.6 (Sundar et al., 2023)

🟣 Topical Variety

Each of these studies was focused on widely different topics, including respiratory healthcare, food practices, buy-now-pay-later financial services, and web-based diary studies. These pieces were—interesting. Within three of the four, Indeemo is used as a tool to enable a tapestry of mobile ethnography approaches (some methodologies and some methods). Within one of the articles (Sundar et al., 2023), Indeemo is mentioned, but the article is quite hard to follow overall. These articles could not be more different from one another, and I encourage clicking on the various links above to get a sense of what was included on the Indeemo site.

🟣 Methodology and Methods Variety

Like I mentioned above, none of these articles mentioned photovoice as a methodological approach. Methodologies deployed included Rapid Application Development, mobile ethnography (sometimes used synonymously with digital ethnography), mixed methods with a mobile ethnography component, and co-design and user-centered methodologies used in concert. In the studies where researchers used Indeemo for data collection, it was used mainly to explore participants' daily experiences. Participants would use the smartphone app to create daily diaries of sorts by adding text, photographs, and videos.

🟣 International Contexts

While some of the publications listed on the Indeemo site were based in the United States (US), none of the journal articles were based in the US (i.e., US as national context of the study) or written by US-based researchers. Because Indeemo is headquartered in Ireland, this is not surprising. Perhaps the tool has simply not yet gained a strong foothold in US academic contexts.

🟣 We Still Need a Photovoice App

I've circled back to where I started. And this means we still need a photovoice app. Indeemo seems quite interesting and intriguing, but it does a bit more than we need it to do, and it was not created with photovoice in mind. Remember, both EthOS and Indeemo were created primarily for market research.

To be sure, those of us doing photovoice are always innovating, coupling together all sorts of digital tools (e.g., Qualtrics, Google Forms, Padlet, Zoom) to make our projects work, yet a tool built with photovoice as the starting point could be very helpful.

If, by chance, you are aware of a photovoice project in which EthOS or Indeemo are being/were used, send me a note! No doubt these tools could be fascinating and fun to use.

AND, if you would like to collaborate on the creation of a photovoice app, send me a note!

🥹 Thanks for spending a moment with me this Friday.
💌 If you’re new here, welcome! I hope this space becomes one you look forward to each week.

📬 Have a question you want me to answer in a future issue? Reach me at photovoicefieldnotes@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for being here.

Warmly,
Mandy
photovoice field notes
photovoicefieldnotes.com