Last spring I took on a product photography gig that seemed straightforward enough. Sixty product shots, consistent white background, all needing the same resize, sharpen, and export treatment. I quoted two hours, opened Photoshop, and started editing image number one.

I finished image number sixty-three at 1:47 in the morning.

That is not a workflow. That is a punishment. And the worst part? I had done this before. Multiple times. I just kept forgetting that batch processing existed because I never sat down long enough to actually learn it properly.

If you’re resizing, color correcting, watermarking, or exporting more than about five images using the same steps, and you’re doing it manually, you are leaving serious time on the table. Let’s talk about how to stop doing that.

What Photoshop Is Actually Doing When You Batch Process

Batch processing in Photoshop is built on two things working together: Actions and the Batch command (or Image Processor, which we’ll get to). An Action is essentially a macro, a recorded sequence of steps Photoshop will replay on demand. The Batch command tells Photoshop to take that Action and run it across an entire folder of files automatically, without you clicking a single thing after you press go.

Under the hood, Photoshop is opening each file, executing the Action steps in sequence, optionally saving and closing the file, then moving to the next one. It’s not doing anything smarter than that, which is also why it can break if your Action includes a step that doesn’t apply universally (more on that in a minute). Understanding this keeps you from building Actions that explode on file number seven.

Recording an Action That Won’t Break Halfway Through

Open the Actions panel (Window > Actions) and click the New Action button at the bottom. Name it something descriptive like “Product Export 1200px” rather than “Action 47,” because future-you will have no idea what Action 47 does.

Hit Record, then perform your steps exactly as you want them applied. For a typical product photo workflow, that might look like: Image > Image Size, set width to 1200 pixels at 150 PPI, click OK. Then Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask, set Amount to 85%, Radius 1.0, Threshold 3. Then File > Export > Export As, choose JPEG, quality at 80, and save to a specific folder. Stop recording.

A few things that will save you grief. First, avoid recording steps that reference specific layer names, because if a file doesn’t have a layer called “Background copy,” the Action will stop and throw an error. Second, if you’re exporting, set your destination folder inside the Action itself during recording, but know that you’ll override this in the Batch dialog anyway. Third, test the Action on three or four files with different dimensions before you unleash it on 200.

The Batch Dialog Is Where the Magic Lives

Go to File > Automate > Batch. This is where you tell Photoshop which Action to run, where to find the source files, and where to put the output.

Set your Source to Folder and point it at your input folder. Check “Suppress File Open Options Dialogs” and “Suppress Color Profile Warnings” or the whole thing will pause and ask you to click OK on every single file, which defeats the point entirely. Set Destination to Folder, choose your output folder, and decide whether you want Photoshop to rename the files automatically. I usually set it to add a suffix like “_web” so I can tell the exports apart from the originals.

Click OK and go make coffee. Depending on file size and how many steps your Action includes, Photoshop can chew through about 30 to 50 high-resolution JPEGs in the time it takes to walk to the counter and back, at least in the coffee shop where I do most of my work.

When Image Processor Is Actually the Better Tool

Image Processor (File > Scripts > Image Processor) is a lighter version of the Batch workflow and it is genuinely underrated. You don’t need a pre-recorded Action to use it. It has a built-in resize function, lets you export simultaneously to JPEG, PSD, and TIFF from a single run, and will create the output folders for you if they don’t exist yet.

It’s perfect for situations where all you need is a resize and format conversion without anything fancier. For my product gig, I could have used Image Processor to spit out web-ready 800px JPEGs and full-res TIFFs for the client in one pass. Instead I manually resized everything, which is why I was awake at 1:47 in the morning.

You can also apply an Action inside Image Processor if you need to. Run your color correction Action first, then hand the results off to Image Processor for the resize and export. That combination handles probably 80% of the repetitive photo editing work I run into as a freelancer.

The Mistake I Made That Cost Me an Afternoon

A few years ago, before I actually committed to learning this properly, I recorded an Action that included a Levels adjustment I’d done by clicking directly on the histogram. Seemed fine. Ran it on a folder of 90 images. Came back to find every single image had the same Levels adjustment baked in, regardless of whether it helped or destroyed the exposure. Some images that were already bright came out completely blown out.

The fix is simple: use Adjustment Layers instead of direct adjustments whenever possible inside an Action, because they’re non-destructive and you can review them afterward. Or better yet, if exposure is going to vary between files, skip the tonal corrections in the batch entirely and only automate the steps that are truly universal, like resizing and sharpening.

Batch processing doesn’t make your decisions for you. It just repeats them very, very fast, which means a bad decision at the recording stage becomes a bad decision multiplied across every file in your folder. Record carefully, test on a small sample, and then let Photoshop do the boring part while you go drink an overpriced latte and feel like a genius.