Edit in Photoshop

"first of all, you could have placed them as a 'linked image' and you would be able to select the image and edit in whatever program that you created the 'linked image' in"

I didn't create the linked images.  I copied/pasted them directly into Illustrator from the internet and they do not paste as linked images.  Also, bringing the images in as linked images makes little difference.  The whole process is still cumbersome.  It's still a matter of getting them into Photoshop, one by one.  If it's 10 images or more, then I have to question whether or not I should try to do some of the work outside of Adobe.

"if your work process is to 'embed' an image, you are doing this so that the artwork will always stay with the Illustrator document. If you 'link' the images, and if you plan to hand the file to someone else, you need to give the 'linked images - hopefully in a folder, and the Illustrator document — vs — if you have it embedded, you can just give the one file, albeit a huge Illustrator document. By having these images as linked, aftr you edit them, it should update automatically"

All of that is pointless.  I think you either didn't read my comment or you don't understand it.  I'm bringing images into Illustrator then making changes on those images in the fastest way possible.  If I were using Astute Graphics, I could skip  all of the embedding part of it.  I can copy/paste the images into Illustrator, then immediately crop or recolor the images all, all together, all at once.  That's the absolute fastest way to do it that I know of.  With Illustrator alone, what is the fastest way to crop or recolor a bunch of images?  That's the problem.  With Illustrator alone, there is no fastest way.  The cropping tool in Illustrator is strictly 1 image at a time. The options for recoloring images are insufficient and very basic.  And it's not even possible to select a bunch of images and send them to Photoshop all at once.  It's all one by one.  If the images are linked, it's just more steps.  If the images are embeded it's still a long process.  If I'm pasting images from the internet, they come in as embedded.  The alternative is to save the images to a folder first but that's more time consuming.  The only solution is to use Astute Graphics plugins which cost $150.00 a year on top of the most expensive 2d graphics software.   Meanwhile, Affinity Studio has all of that functionality baked into a single program, for free.  I'm not saying it's better than Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, but just this part of it is grossly better than what Adobe is doing.  I wish Adobe would revisit this part of Illustrator.  The image editing tools currently in Illustrator are decades old.   It's time to revamp that area.  The way people are working now probably involves more mixing of vector and raster images.  Adobe hasn't recognized this yet.