What a distributor delivery specification is
A distributor delivery specification is the rulebook a distributor, network or studio sets for how a production must hand over its stills. It documents the technical and organisational requirements a delivery has to meet — typically file formats and sizes, colour space, resolution, file naming, folder structure, and the image metadata each image must carry.
The point of a delivery spec is consistency and usability at the receiving end. A distributor handling many titles needs every production’s stills to arrive in a predictable shape so they can be ingested, searched and published without rework. A delivery that ignores the spec — wrong format, missing captions, inconsistent naming — gets sent back, costing time against a publicity deadline.
Meeting the spec means letting it, not habit, decide how files are exported and packaged: which formats to convert from the RAW file originals, how to name them, and what to embed. Image Approvals packages approved sets to distributor specification as standard. For a worked example of common requirements, see our photography delivery specs.
Delivery specs set image counts, not just file formats
A delivery spec is not only a technical document. Most also set a minimum number of approved images the production has to hand over — and this is the requirement that catches productions out, because it can only be met with images that have survived talent approval.
That minimum is expressed in whatever way suits the distributor. Common shapes include:
- A total for the title — a single overall number of approved stills for the film or series.
- A count per key cast member — a minimum number of approved images of each principal, so no lead is under-represented in the campaign.
- A count per episode — for returning and limited series, a floor that every episode has to clear on its own.
Specs often go a step further and break the number down by image type: a minimum of unit stills (the in-scene shots, sometimes called episodics) and a separate minimum of behind-the-scenes (BTS) images. A delivery that hits its total but is short on BTS still fails the spec.
Why the quota decides how many images go to talent
Approved images are the only ones that count towards the quota, and cast kill rights remove images from the pool at the very end of the process. So the number a production needs at delivery is not the number it needs to start with — the working set that goes out for approval has to be large enough that, after every actor has used their kill allowance, what remains still clears the distributor’s minimum in every category it measures.
Get that sizing wrong and the problem surfaces at the worst possible moment: approvals are finished, the cast have exercised their rights in good faith, the shoot is long wrapped — and the approved pool is short. There is no clean fix at that point.
Image Approvals works the number backwards with you. We take the delivery spec’s minimums, apply each actor’s contracted kill percentages, and tell you how many images need to reach talent — and be in the initial working set — for the approved set to land on spec. Across the productions we handle, an average of 71% of a working set makes it through cast and producer approval, but the right margin for your production depends on your cast’s contracts and how the spec counts. We calculate it rather than guess it.
Catching a coverage shortfall while you can still shoot
The quotas that are hardest to hit are the ones measured per cast member, per episode or per image type, because a total can look healthy while one category quietly runs short. A supporting lead who was only on set for a handful of days, or a run of episodes with barely any BTS coverage, will not show up in a headline number.
For productions that come to us at start of production, our logging service records what each image actually is — which cast appear, which episode, whether it is a unit still or BTS — and tracks running totals per actor as the shoot progresses. That means a shortfall is visible while the crew is still on set: we can flag that a principal is under-covered or an episode is light on BTS, and your stills photographer can be briefed to capture more of it. Once the unit wraps, that option is gone.
Captions are usually part of the spec too
Delivery specs commonly require every image to arrive captioned, with the caption embedded in the file’s IPTC metadata rather than supplied in a separate list. Captions typically have to identify the cast and characters in shot, the episode, the photographer credit and the copyright line — and a distributor that ingests images into a press library will reject or return a set that arrives without them.
Captioning is part of our editorial service, and our guide to captioning film & TV stills covers what a good caption contains and why it decides whether an image gets found and used correctly once it is out in the world.