If you manage media at live events, you’ve probably landed on at least one of these three tools at some point — or been recommended one by someone who’s never actually had to approve 600 photos in a 15-minute window between sets.
Frame.io and Pixieset are both genuinely good products. That’s important to say upfront. This isn’t a comparison designed to make the competition look bad. It’s a comparison designed to help you figure out which tool was actually built for the kind of work you’re doing — because using the wrong one costs you time, and at live events, time is the one thing you never have enough of.
Frame.io was built for video production workflows. If you’re working in commercial, film, or agency post-production, it’s an excellent piece of software. The review and annotation tools are best-in-class for what they were designed to do — detailed, frame-by-frame feedback on motion work.
Editorial feedback on video, collaborative review for agency and post-production teams, version tracking across multiple cuts, detailed annotation on specific moments in a timeline.
The core problem is that Frame.io thinks in video. Stills are supported, but the interface, the mental model, and the pricing are all built around motion content. When your workflow is a dozen photographers submitting JPEGs from a festival, you’re using the tool sideways.
The approval flow is designed for one reviewer at a time working through detailed feedback — not a talent manager on a bus who needs to approve or reject 40 photos in bulk before they lose cell service. There’s no concept of multi-photographer galleries, no native submission structure for live event content, and the cost is significant for a tool you’re primarily using for stills features you could get elsewhere.
If your approval process involves detailed editorial notes and multiple revision rounds, Frame.io makes sense. If your approval process involves a client making quick decisions on a tight timeline, it’s more tool than the job requires.
Pixieset was built for wedding and portrait photographers. If that’s your world, it’s excellent — beautiful galleries, a polished client experience, and a delivery flow that makes sense for the single-shooter, single-client model that defines most portrait work.
Delivering finished galleries to wedding clients, consumer-facing photo delivery, e-commerce and print ordering, single-photographer studio workflows.
Pixieset assumes a specific model: one photographer, one event, one client, delivered after careful culling and editing. That model works beautifully for weddings. It doesn’t map to a music festival.
At a live event, you have multiple photographers submitting simultaneously during the show, an internal team that needs to review before anything goes to a client, multiple clients with different scopes of access, and a turnaround expectation measured in hours. Pixieset wasn’t built for any of that.
There’s no real approval workflow to speak of — clients can leave comments and favorites, but there’s no approve/reject structure, no audit trail, no bulk decision tools. And the gallery experience, while beautiful, is designed for leisurely browsing after the fact, not fast decisions under time pressure.
If you’re delivering a finished wedding gallery to a couple three weeks after the event, Pixieset is great. If you’re trying to get artist approval before a show ends, it’s the wrong tool entirely.
ApprovalTrack was built specifically for live event media workflows — not adapted from another use case, not close enough to make work. Built from scratch around the specific problem of managing multiple photographers, multiple stakeholders, and fast-moving approvals at live events.
Multi-photographer submissions during an event, sequential internal-then-client approval workflows, bulk approve/reject decisions, full audit trail with attribution, and content delivery with photographer credits intact.
Photographers submit directly into organized galleries scoped to their event assignments. Internal teams review first. Clients get a tokenized share link that works on any device, requires no account, and lets them make bulk decisions in a single tap. Every action is logged with name, email, and timestamp — so when someone asks who approved what and when, the answer is a click away.
Download packages include a photographer credit file by default, so the handoff to social or brand partners doesn’t require anyone to reconstruct attribution from memory.
It’s not trying to be a video review platform or a consumer gallery tool. It’s trying to do one job well: get live event media from submission to approved delivery without the chaos that usually fills the gap between.
Use Frame.io if: You’re working in video production, film, or commercial agency post, and need detailed frame-level review tools with version tracking.
Use Pixieset if: You’re a wedding or portrait photographer delivering finished galleries to individual clients who have time to browse.
Use ApprovalTrack if: You’re managing media at live events — festivals, concerts, tours, production — with multiple photographers, multiple approval parties, and a timeline that doesn’t accommodate slow tools.
The right workflow isn’t the most feature-rich one. It’s the one that was designed for how you actually work.
ApprovalTrack is currently in an invite-only pilot for live event media teams. Request a demo →
