Managing a media team at a music festival is a different animal from almost every other photography context. You’ve got multiple shooters across multiple stages, a submission window measured in hours not days, and approval stakeholders who are often unavailable, distracted, or somewhere in a VIP area without cell service.
The current process for most teams? A patchwork of group chats, shared folders, and informal approvals that sort of works until it doesn’t — and it always picks the worst moment to fall apart.
Here are five things that make a real difference.
The single biggest source of chaos in festival media workflows is fragmentation. When photographers are dropping selects into a WhatsApp thread, a shared Dropbox folder, a DM, and occasionally a WeTransfer link sent to the wrong email — you’re not managing submissions, you’re doing archaeology.
Pick one channel. Brief every photographer on it before load-in, not during. Print it in the comms sheet if you have to. The channel itself matters less than the consistency — whatever you use, make sure it’s the only place submissions land.
This is also where submission deadlines earn their keep. A clearly communicated cutoff gives photographers a target and gives your team a clean moment to stop chasing and start sorting.
Every festival media team gets headliner shots. The gap is almost always fan experience — crowd energy, production moments, the things that make the event feel alive beyond the stage.
The problem is that photographers naturally gravitate toward the main stage and the pit. If you don’t explicitly assign coverage zones and brief for those gaps, you’ll end up with 400 photos of the headline act and almost nothing from the festival grounds.
Build your shot list by area, not just by artist. Assign photographers to specific zones and rotate coverage if the schedule allows. Make it clear what you need and why — most photographers want to deliver the full picture, they just need to know what that picture actually is.
Approval chaos almost always traces back to a process that was figured out during the event instead of before it. Who needs to approve content? In what order? What’s the turnaround window for talent management? What happens when a rep goes dark for three hours?
These are questions you want answered at your pre-event briefing, not at 11pm when the headliner just walked offstage and social needs approved content by midnight.
Define the process. Communicate it to your team. Make sure external stakeholders — management companies, brand partners, publicists — know exactly what to expect and when. The approval workflow should be as rehearsed as the show itself.
“Get me your selects by end of night” is not a deadline.
A deadline has a specific time, a specific channel, and a clear consequence for missing it. If photographers know that submissions close at 23:00 and anything received after that goes into a separate delayed review queue, they’ll prioritize accordingly.
Soft deadlines produce soft results. The more clearly you communicate the cutoff — and follow through on it — the cleaner your submission process becomes across every event you run.
Consider sending a reminder ahead of the deadline. A heads-up at the one-hour mark gives photographers time to wrap their selects without feeling blindsided by a hard stop.
The credit sheet is always an afterthought until it isn’t.
Two weeks after the festival, a brand partner comes back asking who shot a specific photo they want to use in a campaign. A publicist needs confirmation that an image of their client was properly attributed. A photographer flags that their credit was stripped somewhere in the handoff to social.
These situations are entirely avoidable — but only if attribution is baked into your submission process from the start, not assembled from memory after the fact.
Every file that comes in should have a clear owner. Every approved photo that goes out should carry a credit line. The more of this you can automate or systematize, the less time you spend rebuilding that information under pressure.
All five of these come down to the same thing: decisions made before the event go smoothly, decisions made during the event go sideways.
The best festival media workflows are boring in the best possible way. Submissions come in on time, approvals move through the right people in the right order, and the credit sheet ships with the zip. Nobody’s chasing anyone down at midnight.
That’s the standard worth building toward — every event, every time.
ApprovalTrack is a media submission and approval platform built by festival media managers for festival media managers. Request a demo →
