Last spring I picked up a product photography gig that seemed straightforward enough. Two hundred product shots, clean white background, consistent color grade, client needed them by Friday. I said yes, quoted a fair price, and sat down Monday morning at my usual corner table at Epoch Coffee with what I thought was plenty of time.

By Tuesday afternoon I had edited 40 images by hand. Forty. In six hours. The math on that was not doing me any favors.

I opened Photoshop’s batch processing tools that night, rebuilt my workflow around them, and delivered all 200 images Thursday morning. If you’re still editing photos one at a time for any job that involves more than, say, ten images with the same treatment, you are leaving serious time on the table.

What Photoshop’s Batch Function Is Actually Doing

Batch processing in Photoshop is not magic. It’s a recorder and a runner. You record a sequence of steps as an Action, and then you point Photoshop at a folder of files and tell it to run that Action on every single one, automatically, and save the outputs wherever you want.

Under the hood, Photoshop is opening each file, executing your Action commands in sequence, saving the result, and closing the file before moving to the next. No GPU tricks, no AI, no cloud. Just Photoshop doing exactly what you told it to do, over and over, while you go refill your coffee. The key insight is that Photoshop records most operations as editable steps, including adjustments, filters, resizing, sharpening, and even Save As commands. That means almost any repeatable edit you currently do by hand is a candidate for automation.

Recording an Action Worth a Damn

Open your Actions panel. Window > Actions, or press Alt+F9 on Windows. Click the folder icon to make a new Action Set, name it something useful like “Client Exports 2024,” then click the New Action button, name the Action, and hit Record.

Now do your edits exactly as you would normally. For that product shoot, my Action looked like this: Image > Auto Tone (a simple starting point for consistent lighting), then a Curves adjustment layer with a specific S-curve I had dialed in for the client’s product color profile, then Image > Image Size set to 2000px on the long edge at 300 DPI, then a small Unsharp Mask at 85%, 1.0 radius, 0 threshold, and finally File > Save As into a designated output folder as a high-quality JPEG at compression level 10. Hit Stop. That’s your Action.

One thing that trips people up: if your Action includes a Save As step, Photoshop will remember the exact output folder you specified during recording. Every file in the batch will save there. That is a feature, not a bug. Keep a dedicated “Batch Output” folder on your desktop so you always know where your files are landing.

Running the Batch and Not Screwing It Up

Go to File > Automate > Batch. In the dialog, select your Action Set and your specific Action from the dropdowns at the top. Under Source, choose Folder and navigate to your input folder. Under Destination, choose Folder again and point it at your output folder. If your Action already has a Save step baked in, check the box that says “Override Action ‘Save As’ Commands” so Photoshop uses your batch destination instead of whatever was hardcoded during recording.

The “Suppress Color Profile Warnings” and “Suppress File Open Options Dialogs” checkboxes are worth checking. Without them, Photoshop will stop and ask you about color profiles on every single file, which completely defeats the point. Hit OK and walk away. For 200 images with moderate adjustments, expect somewhere between 8 and 25 minutes depending on your machine and file sizes. My i7 laptop running 25MB RAW files took about 18 minutes for that 200-image batch. That’s 18 minutes versus six hours.

When Batch Processing Will Betray You

Batch is not a silver bullet. It fails in two situations: when your source files are wildly inconsistent, and when your Action includes anything that requires a human judgment call.

I learned this on a real estate photography batch where half the shots were taken in full sun and half in shade. My Auto Tone step, which works beautifully on consistent product shots, overcorrected everything shot in shade and turned it green. I had to re-edit 60 images by hand. The fix is to shoot for consistency upfront, or to pre-sort your files into separate folders by lighting condition and run different Actions on each group.

The judgment call problem is trickier. If your workflow involves manually masking a subject, healing specific spots, or making creative decisions based on what’s actually in the frame, that’s not batchable. Save your Action for the stuff that truly doesn’t change from file to file: resizing, sharpening, watermarking, color grading on consistent source material, format conversion.

Droplets: The Next Level You Probably Haven’t Used

Once you have an Action you trust, go to File > Automate > Create Droplet. This packages your Action as a standalone .exe (Windows) or application file (Mac) that lives on your desktop or in your taskbar. Drag a folder of images onto the Droplet icon, and it runs the batch without you ever opening Photoshop’s menus. I keep Droplets for my three most common export specs: web JPEGs at 1200px wide, print TIFFs at 300 DPI, and square social crops at 1080px. Three icons on my desktop, drag and drop, done.

A client can even hand you a Droplet if they have their own export spec they use repeatedly. You run it, they get exactly what they need, nobody has to explain settings over email six times.

The honest bottom line here is this: the hour you spend building and testing a solid batch Action will pay back double on the very first job you use it for, and every job after that is pure profit on your time. Build the Action once, run it forever.