The digitizing of photos for sending over wire — basically, fax — has been around since at least WWII. The famous Iwo Jima flag-raising shot got to the US for distribution via fax.
I knew wire service photographs had been done. I read Homer_J_Simpson’s WW2 threads. To me, that was the easy part. The hard part of the lunar orbiters was the onboard remote development and handling of the film in a small spacecraft in the harsh environment of space a quarter of a million miles away from the closest human being. And each orbiter ran over a hundred photos.
At a time when success or failure of a space probe leaving earth orbit was fairly chancy, all five Lunar Orbiters functioned perfectly without any major malfunctions. The Lunar Orbiter program was an unknown triumph.