Digital asset management for film and TV production

Your unit still photographer shot 1,800 images today. They're sitting on a laptop in a trailer, waiting to be ingested, culled, tagged, captioned, uploaded to a gallery, and emailed to you with a link. Tomorrow, there'll be another 1,800. By wrap, you'll have somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 images to manage across five or six different tools that were never designed to talk to each other.

Dropbox for raw files. Email chains for approvals. A spreadsheet to track which talent has killed which photos (and whether they've hit their contractual limit). WeTransfer for sending EPK packages to the distributor. PhotoShelter or Shootproof for the gallery nobody can find the password to. And somewhere in all of that, photographer credits are getting stripped, kill rights are going untracked, and your chain of title documentation has gaps you won't discover until a distributor asks for it.

That's the reality for most unit publicists working on feature films and episodic TV. ReelStorage replaces that patchwork with a single workflow built for production stills.

The actual problem

The volume alone is enough to break most systems. A TV series season can generate 200,000-500,000 unit stills. But volume isn't even the hard part.

Tagging eats your time. Manual face tagging across thousands of images burns 15-20 hours per month. That's hours a publicist could spend on actual publicity strategy.

Approvals move at email speed. You export a PDF contact sheet in Lightroom or InDesign, email it to talent's rep, and wait. Days. Sometimes weeks. When feedback comes back, it's a scanned printout with pen marks, or worse, a reply that says "kill #47, #112, and the one where I'm looking left." Good luck matching that to your files.

Kill rights live in spreadsheets. Or they don't live anywhere at all. A-list talent might have 30-50% kill rights on solo shots. Supporting cast gets 15-25%. Tracking usage against contractual limits in Excel is one formula error away from a legal problem. Use a killed image in marketing materials and you're looking at breach of contract.

Chain of title has holes. When a distributor or sales agent asks for proof that every image in your EPK was cleared by talent, you need timestamped records. Digging through six months of email threads to reconstruct an approval history is nobody's idea of a good time.

How ReelStorage solves it

The workflow runs in one direction: upload from set, organize and tag, review and approve, distribute and track. Every step happens in one place.

Capture and upload

Your photographer uploads directly from set or from their laptop at end of day. RAW files, high-res JPGs, whatever format they shoot. Uploads process in the background, so there's no waiting around for an import to finish before starting the next task. Upload links let photographers push files into the right project without needing a full account.

Organize and tag

This is where the time savings add up. Face recognition scans every upload, detects faces, and clusters them automatically. Instead of tagging 1,800 images by hand, you review the clusters, confirm identities, and tags apply across every matching photo. New uploads get matched against confirmed clusters, so the system gets smarter as the production goes on.

IPTC metadata is preserved and editable. Photographer credits, captions, copyright, keywords. Everything stays embedded through every export, every download, every share. Folders and tags give you the organizational structure to sort by scene, production day, cast member, or however your team works. Bulk operations let you tag, move, or update hundreds of images at once.

Review and approve

Talent approvals are the core of the production workflow. Set each talent's contractual kill percentage. The system delivers images to talent through a secure, mobile-friendly review interface. Talent can zoom in, approve, or kill, and see exactly how many kills they have left. When they hit their contractual limit, the system enforces it.

Every approval and every kill is timestamped and logged. That's your chain of title documentation, built automatically. Watermarking on preview images prevents unauthorized use of unapproved stills.

Distribute and track

Build EPK packages from your approved, cleared images. Secure distribution with expiring links lets you share with press, distributors, and marketing teams without losing control. Exports preserve IPTC metadata so photographer credits travel with the files. The activity log records every download, every view, every share, giving you a complete audit trail.

Role-based permissions mean your photographer sees their upload queue, talent sees their approval queue, the studio exec gets a read-only overview, and the distributor gets access to cleared assets only. Two-factor authentication adds another layer for productions that require it.

Finding what you need

With tens of thousands of images per production, finding specific shots matters. Advanced search lets you filter by talent, scene, date, approval status, or any combination. "All approved solo shots of the lead from episodes 3-5" takes seconds, not an afternoon of scrolling.

The dashboard gives publicists and producers a real-time view of approval status per talent, upload progress, and upcoming delivery deadlines. Project management features keep everything scoped to the production, with nothing crossing over between shows.

Virus scanning checks every upload automatically, which matters when you're receiving files from multiple photographers, freelancers, and external vendors across a production.

Industry context

Production photography operates under specific constraints that generic DAM tools don't account for.

SAG-AFTRA requirements govern how talent images are handled, approved, and distributed. Kill rights aren't optional. They're contractual obligations negotiated during casting, and the penalties for getting them wrong are real.

MPA security standards apply to most major studio productions. Content leaks end careers. Your asset management system needs access controls, audit trails, and watermarking that actually work, not bolted-on features that look good in a demo.

Delivery timelines are compressed. Same-day EPK delivery is increasingly the expectation, not a nice-to-have. When a streaming platform wants first-look images for a press announcement, "we'll have those in a few weeks" isn't an answer that works.

Photographer credits matter. Unit still photographers are professionals whose IPTC credits need to survive the distribution pipeline. When a photo hits Entertainment Weekly or gets posted on a streaming platform's social channels, the photographer's name should be in the metadata. That's not just courtesy, it's contractual.

Who this is for

Unit publicists who spend more time chasing approvals than planning publicity strategy. You'll get automated delivery to talent, real-time kill rights tracking, and exportable clearance documentation that's always audit-ready.

Unit still photographers who want their daily workflow to be upload, tag, deliver, done. No more duplicate exports to multiple platforms, no more stripped metadata, no more wondering if the publicist got the files.

Producers and production coordinators who need visibility into the stills pipeline without getting buried in the details. Dashboard views and permission controls give you oversight without creating extra work for the publicity team.