Do I have to sand them before application? Pics below. Sorry, ****ty camera...
The first set is a pretty sizable gash... depending on how involved you'd want to be, you could fill those in with some sort of body filler or metal glaze... and then paint over them. I would still mask of fairly close to the area just in case your paint color is different from the rim, you'll minimize paint mismatch.
I'm not rim expert, so take what I said with a grain of salt, there may be more effective ways to fill in and repair those gash... it's just my initial "what I would do" reaction.
By the way, I'm pretty sure that it's not because your camera is sh***y, but because you may need to put your camera in macro mode if you're taking pictures of something that close.