Last month I had a client send me 340 product photos that all needed the same treatment: resize to 1200x1200px, sharpen, adjust levels, export as JPEG at 85% quality. Simple enough, right? Except I sat down at my usual corner table at Epoch Coffee, opened the first image, and immediately had the thought that I really didn’t want to do this 339 more times. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that if something feels tedious before you’ve even started, there’s almost certainly a better way.

There was. There always is. It’s called batch processing, and if you’re still manually editing repetitive sets of images one by one, this is going to feel like finding twenty dollars in an old jacket pocket.

What Photoshop Is Actually Doing When You Batch

Before you set it up, it helps to understand the mechanism. Photoshop’s batch processing runs through the File menu under Automate > Batch, and it works by replaying a recorded Action across every file in a folder. An Action is basically a macro, a saved sequence of steps you’ve performed inside Photoshop. Every click, every adjustment, every export setting gets recorded and stored. When you point the Batch command at a folder of images, Photoshop opens each one, runs the Action from top to bottom, saves the result, and closes the file, then moves to the next one without you touching a single thing.

The key thing to understand is that Actions are linear. They don’t make decisions. If your Action says “set canvas size to 1200x1200” and one of your source images is already 1200x1200, it’ll still run the step, it just won’t visibly change anything. That linearity is actually what makes batch processing reliable. Predictability is a feature, not a limitation.

Recording an Action That Won’t Embarrass You Later

Open one representative image from your set before you record anything. This matters because Photoshop records absolute values in some cases, so if you record your levels adjustment on an image that’s already blown out, you might bake in weird compensation that doesn’t apply elsewhere.

Open the Actions panel (Window > Actions), click the new Action button at the bottom (it looks like the new layer icon), name it something descriptive like “Product Resize Export 1200px,” and hit Record. Now just work normally. For that client job I mentioned, my Action recorded these exact steps:

  1. Image > Image Size: 1200x1200px at 72ppi, Bicubic Sharper resampling
  2. Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask: Amount 85%, Radius 1.0px, Threshold 3
  3. Image > Adjustments > Levels: moved the black point input to 12, white point to 243
  4. File > Export > Export As: JPEG, Quality 85, sRGB color space checked

Hit the stop button in the Actions panel when you’re done. That’s your Action. Don’t overthink it. You can edit individual steps later by double-clicking them in the panel.

Setting Up the Batch Command Without Losing Your Mind

Go to File > Automate > Batch. Here’s what each field actually means and how to set it:

Set and Action: Choose the Action set your new Action lives in, then select the Action itself.

Source: Set this to Folder, then click Choose and point it at your input folder. Check “Suppress File Open Options Dialogs” and “Suppress Color Profile Warnings” or Photoshop will interrupt you with pop-ups on every single file.

Destination: Set this to Folder as well, choose a separate output folder (never output to your source folder, you’ll thank yourself later). In the File Naming section, I usually use something like Document Name + 2-digit serial number + .jpg so each file gets a clean, sequential name.

Override Action “Save As” Commands: Check this box if your Action includes a Save or Export step. This tells Photoshop to use your Destination folder settings instead of whatever path got hardcoded during recording.

Hit OK. Go get coffee. I’m serious. For 340 images that step took about 11 minutes while I read the news.

The Droplet Upgrade Nobody Talks About

Once you’ve got an Action you trust, there’s a faster version of all this called a Droplet. Go to File > Automate > Create Droplet. It uses the exact same settings as Batch, but the output is a small executable file you save wherever you want on your computer. From then on, you just drag image files or entire folders directly onto that Droplet icon and it runs the whole process, no menus, no navigation, nothing. I keep my most-used Droplets in a folder on my desktop. My “Web Resize 2000px” Droplet has probably saved me four or five hours over the last year alone.

When I Finally Stopped Doing It the Hard Way

I’ll be honest with you. I spent an embarrassing amount of my early freelance career not using batch processing because I thought my jobs were always “too custom” for automation. Every client was special, every image needed individual attention. That was partially true and mostly ego.

The shift happened when a friend who does e-commerce photography told me she processes 800 to 1000 images a week with a single Action that handles 90% of the work, and she only manually adjusts the 40 or 50 images that fall outside normal parameters. She spends maybe 2 hours on what used to take her a full day. The batch handles the boring, she handles the weird edge cases. That’s the actual professional workflow.

Most repetitive editing tasks have a pattern to them. Once you identify that pattern, your only job is to record it once and let Photoshop do the grunt work. Your time is better spent on the 10% that actually requires your brain.