No Photo Mechanic for iPhone? Cull, caption and file from your phone

Photo Mechanic is the desk standard for ingesting, culling and captioning, and it runs on a Mac or a Windows PC. There's no iPhone version. So on the days the laptop stays home, here's how the same workflow runs on the phone, step for step.

By João Daniel Pereira, London photographer and the developer of Dispatches · 16 October 2026

Your Photo Mechanic habits, on the phone

If Photo Mechanic is how you work at the desk, this is roughly where each habit lives in Dispatches:

Ingest: filter the card before anything copies

Rate in camera as you shoot. Then plug the card reader into the iPhone and import everything, or filter the import first, to three stars and up or flagged frames, say, so the phone doesn't fill with frames you already rejected. RAW+JPEG pairs stay together, or you choose RAW only or JPEG only. Import from the card (or Files) rather than the iPhone's photo library: the library drops the camera's star ratings.

Dispatches groups the frames into events by time and place, and can match them to your calendar, so a two-job day sorts itself. Importing, step by step.

Cull: one-thumb speed

The event opens as a grid. Double-tap to go full screen, pinch to zoom, then swipe: the zoom level and position carry to the next frame, so you can compare a burst at the same magnification. Press and hold for a loupe to check an eye at 1:1. Drag across the stars to rate, tap to flag or colour-label, and tag each frame for where it's going. Long-press for batch actions, including copying a caption or an edit onto other frames. Culling, step by step.

Caption: presets plus one brief

Your IPTC template becomes a metadata preset: byline, credit, copyright and contact, saved once, and as many presets as you have clients. The shared caption comes from a brief: describe the job in a sentence or two, typed or spoken, and Dispatches drafts the headline, caption, keywords and location for the whole event. Edit anything, apply it, then add a caption prefix on the frames that need a name or a detail. More on IPTC on iPhone and writing the caption itself.

Upload: a saved route, not a dialog

Add each FTP server once as a destination. Then build a workflow: for example "Wire-tagged frames, three stars and up: resize, apply the agency preset, send to the agency's FTP; Social-tagged frames: square JPEG, hand off to Instagram". Tap the workflow, check the preview, press send, and watch each destination fill. Failures can be sent again on their own. FTP from an iPhone, in detail.

What's different

Being honest about it, because you'll notice on day one:

• It's a phone. Culling a 2,000-frame take is quicker on a big screen with a keyboard. Dispatches is built for the take you need to file now, not the full archive edit.
• No camera Wi-Fi link. Photos come in from a card reader, Files or the photo library, not wirelessly from the camera.
• Captions start from a brief rather than from typed codes. There's no equivalent of code replacements; the brief and caption prefix do that job.
• It also edits. Exposure, contrast and more on the phone, RAW files included, before the frames go.
• Social is built in. The same send can hand the social set to Instagram, Threads, X, Facebook, Bluesky and Mastodon.

The way it's meant to be used: keep Photo Mechanic at the desk, and use Dispatches when the laptop stays home. The comparison page sets the two side by side with Lightroom.

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Photo Mechanic is a trademark of Camera Bits, Inc. Dispatches is not affiliated with or endorsed by Camera Bits.