On Mondays I edit all of the images for publication in 5 weekly papers we produce. It’s a ton of work. I have to look through hundreds of photos, select the best ones and covert them into CMYK versions for the printer. Often times we take handout or submitted photos from schools, non-profits and other organizations. These photos are usually of varying quality and lack cutlines or any sense of composition. Sometimes we get one or two and sometimes we get everything they shot (last week it was two emails containing 45 jpgs…EACH. I wish I was making that up).

To start the editing process I fire up PhotoMechanic. If you are unfamiliar with the software check it out here. Its a first-step editor for displaying small thumbnails of the images, selecting the best ones, editing captions and renaming files. It’s actually capable of doing a lot more but I won’t get into that right now. One thing it does is to display EXIF information about each photo. When I looked at the batch, all 90 jpgs, I immediately saw “iPhone 3GS” next to the Model info box.

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