Case Study: All Creatures Great and Small

“As first time users, the human assistance PBS received from the Image Approvals team to navigate the system, coordinate with talent reps, and bundle assets for review was instrumental for us to achieve our goals (especially in our short timeframe)!”

— Claire Quin, PBS, All Creatures Great and Small ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Key Project Wins

• Auditing over 9,000 images to verify all files were accounted for, flagging and recovering any missing RAWs to ensure the set was complete and ready for the next stage.
• Organising the full set into episodic folders, making navigation and retrieval easier for production and post teams.
• Curating the full set down to just under 5,000 images, selecting a balanced and relevant range suitable for cast approval without an overwhelming image count to review.
• Managed approvals for five cast members across 19 shoot days, ensuring a smooth process even with multiple contributors and a large volume of content.

Their Pain

After wrapping the shoot, the team faced a familiar but time-consuming challenge: managing a volume of over 9,000 images captured across 20 days of unit photography, plus a separate gallery shoot. With images coming from different shoot days, locations, and setups, the material needed careful sorting to ensure nothing was overlooked or misfiled.

Each day’s content had to be grouped correctly by episode, so that post-production, publicity, and cast teams could easily locate what was relevant to them. On top of that, the production featured a large ensemble cast — each with contractual rights to approve their stills. What the team needed wasn’t just manpower, but a structured, well-managed workflow that could handle approvals, version control, and episodic organisation all at once, without slowing the wider delivery schedule.

How We Helped

1. Episode Sorting

We mapped shoot days to specific episodes, ensuring that every image was clearly organised and easy to locate in context throughout the approval process.

2. Image Curation

We curated the full set of over 9,000 images down to a tight selection of just under 4,500, balancing production needs with editorial quality and approval relevance.

3. Cast Experience

We provided a smooth and intuitive platform experience for cast members, making the approval process straightforward and stress-free — even for those juggling tight schedules.

Timeline

The approval cycle ran on a fast turnaround across two months:

• 7th August — Original images received
• 11th August — All images curated, tagged and online for review
• 8th September — Cast-approved images organised and delivered

Four days from receipt to cast-ready. The ImageApprovals platform makes that kind of turnaround possible by giving each cast member a private, easy-to-use login — no email chains, no spreadsheets.

Long-Term Collaboration

Since collaborating on All Creatures Great and Small 4, we have gone on to work with the team for 3 subsequent seasons. That ongoing work has included:

• Conducting comprehensive image audits
• Refining high numbers of stills into usable sets
• Structuring stills by episode and gallery
• Ensuring accurate cast tagging at scale
• Writing captions and applying metadata

Across the Seasons

Over all seasons together, the numbers tell the story:

Metric	Total
Images handled	Over 13,000
Average approval rate	78%
Stills curated out	Over 6,000
Days of coverage	More than 42

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Do you have a cast with stills approvals rights? We can handle the organisation, curation, and approvals workflow from end to end — contact us for a no-obligation quote or learn more about how the ImageApprovals platform works.