Yep, I think we pictures are becoming a valuable as text and it is fine, we just need to get used to it.
Before photography became mainstream the only source of information was written, it is extremely simple to make a fake story so people had to rely on trusted sources. Then for a short period of history photography became a (kinda) reliable sources of information by itself and this trust system lost its importance.
In most cases seeing a photo means that we were seeing a true reflection of what happened, especially if we were song multiple photos of the same event.
Now we are arriving at the end of this period, we cannot trust a photo by itself anymore, tampering a photo is becoming as easy as writing a fake story. This is a great opportunity for journalists I believe.
I would look into the Surfaces, you can find a cheap second hand one and install Linux on it.