The whole chain from pressing the shutter to a photo landing in an editor's inbox used to take hours and at least one courier. It now takes about a minute. Which means the only part left to get right is the part Dad actually cared about, choosing and labelling the right frame.
This guide pulls together four of his old factsheets, Photos and Transparencies, How to Send Photos to Editors, How to Store Your Photos and Photo Libraries, because in 2026 they are really one job.
Off the phone and into the cloud
Your photos should back themselves up without you thinking about it. Turn on iCloud Photos or Google Photos and the shot is safe before you have left the scene. AirDrop or a cable gets a full-resolution copy onto a laptop when you need to edit properly. The point is simple: never let the only copy of a picture live on a device you could drop in a gutter.
Sending it to an editor
Match the method to the size. One or two frames, email them, full resolution, no shrinking. A batch from an event, use a transfer service like WeTransfer or a shared drive so nothing gets compressed into mush by an email server. Ask the editor once what they prefer and then do that every time, because the photographer who files clean and consistent is the one who gets called again.
Send full resolution unless told otherwise, in JPEG for news, and never bake heavy filters into a news picture.
Caption and credit so it survives
A photo with no caption is half a story, and a photo with no credit is a gift to whoever steals it next. Write the caption into the file's metadata, the IPTC fields, not just in the body of the email, so the words travel with the picture wherever it goes. Put your name in the credit field. This is the digital version of exactly what Dad taught: the picture and its true caption are one object, and you do not separate them.
Storing and finding them later
A folder structure you will still understand in two years beats a clever one you will forget by Friday. Date plus event is enough. Back the archive up to a portable SSD as well as the cloud, because two copies in two places is the only backup that counts. When you need a picture you did not take, that is what photo libraries and stock services are for, and you credit and licence those properly too. If you need to trim a frame first, Dad's How to Crop Photos still applies.
What stays the same
The judgment. Which frame tells the truth, what the caption says, whose name is on it. The delivery went from hours to seconds. The decisions did not change at all. Pair this with the shooting guide, Shooting Journalism on a Phone.