Yes, you will prefer UTM. Many more photos are to UTM NAD83 than to state plane. All three tools I mentioned above should be able to reproject to UTM.
If you have a photo that is to state plane and you want it to UTM, you warp/reproject it with GDAL (which underlies QGIS, I'm sure you can also do it from a graphical interface). See the end of
this thread.