The laptop stays home
The slowest part of a shoot is the trip back to a desk. Filing on the phone means the work is out before you've left the venue.
Switching from desktop?
Coming from Lightroom Mobile or Photo Mechanic?
Dispatches puts the culling, captioning, and delivery of a desktop photo workflow on the iPhone you already carry — so you can file from the field instead of driving back to a laptop.
It's not here to replace your edit. If you develop RAWs in Lightroom, keep it. Dispatches is the fast filing desk for everything around the edit: get the keepers in, caption them, and send them — before you leave the venue.
How Dispatches compares.
An honest side-by-side for the part that matters in the field: getting from a full card to a filed shoot, fast.
| In the field | Photo Mechanicdesktop | Lightroommobile + desktop | DispatchesiPhone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs entirely on iPhone — no laptop | —Desktop app | PartlyMobile app, but a lighter workflow | YesThe whole job lives on the phone |
| Import only the rated / flagged frames off an SD card | YesOn the desktop | — | YesStraight to the phone |
| Cull fast, filter by file type and rating | Yes | Partly | Yes |
| Reusable IPTC / metadata presets | Yes | Partly | Yes |
| Caption a whole take from one voice memo | — | — | YesClean IPTC across the batch |
| Send straight to FTP from the device | YesFrom the desktop | — | YesFrom the phone |
| Post to social from the same app | — | Partly | Yes |
| Full RAW develop & editing | —It's a culler, not an editor | YesIts strength | Not our jobKeep your editor for this |
| Pricing | Paid licence | Subscription | £4.99/mo14-day free trial |
The honest version: Photo Mechanic is brilliant at culling and IPTC — but it lives on your laptop. Lightroom is the gold standard for editing — but its mobile filing story is thin. Dispatches isn't trying to beat either at what they're great at. It does the bit they leave on the desk: import the keepers, caption fast, and file from the field on the phone in your hand. Many photographers use Dispatches alongside Lightroom, not instead of it.
Why photographers switch the filing to their phone.
One app, not a desktop stack
Cull, IPTC, and FTP in one place — instead of a Photo Mechanic + editor + FTP-client chain you can only run sitting down.
Captions without the typing
A single voice memo writes IPTC across the whole take — something neither a desktop culler nor a mobile editor does today.