Section
Picture desk
How pictures are commissioned, culled, captioned and cleared before a page closes — and what goes wrong when any of those steps is left to the end of the shift.
A picture desk is judged on two things: whether the right frame ran, and whether the words under it were true. Everything else — the ingest, the culling, the crops, the clearances — exists to make those two outcomes repeatable on a day when nothing goes to plan.
In this section we treat that work as a craft rather than as a piece of software. Captions and the house rules that govern them, the order in which a take is cut down, who signs off a picture that carries risk, and the handover to production when the page is already late.
- New
How to write a news photo caption
A caption is not a label and it is not a summary of the story. It is the only place where a reader is told what they are actually looking at, and it…
29 September 2026
- New
What a picture desk actually does on deadline
Everyone knows the picture desk chooses the pictures. Almost nobody outside one knows that choosing is the smallest part of the job, and the part least…
29 September 2026
- New
How editors choose the lead image
The lead image is the only part of a story most readers will see. It appears in the feed, in the share card, on the section page and at the top of…
29 September 2026
- New
IPTC photo metadata: the fields that matter
An image file can carry dozens of metadata fields. A picture desk uses about eight of them, and a library that fills those eight well is more useful than…
29 September 2026
- New
What may be changed in a news photograph, and what may not
Every news photograph is processed. A raw sensor file is not publishable, and turning one into a printed or screen image involves a series of choices…
29 September 2026
- Archive 2005
Media Mogul Picture Desk: end-to-end control of image workflows
The picture desk system built for newspapers and magazines handling a daily flood of incoming images.
- Archive 2005
FastFoto: helping picture editors pick from the daily flood
The picture desk product that preceded Media Mogul, and the problem it was built for.
- Archive 2005
E-Loader: the pictures that arrive by email
Freelancers and agencies moved to email, and newspapers inherited a volume of attachments nobody had planned for.
Archive index
A census of this site: how much sits in each section, how much of it is reproduced 2005 archive and how much was written for the relaunch.
| Section | All | Archive | New |
|---|---|---|---|
| Picture desk | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| Asset management | 10 | 5 | 5 |
| Rights & licensing | 9 | 4 | 5 |
| Archives | 8 | 4 | 4 |
| Workflow | 11 | 8 | 3 |
| Case studies | 13 | 13 | 0 |
| News | 11 | 11 | 0 |
| Total | 70 | 48 | 22 |