Last month I had a client send over 340 product photos that all needed the same treatment: resize to 1200x1200px, sharpen slightly, export as sRGB JPEGs at 85% quality. Simple enough on one image. On 340 images, sitting in a coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon with a lukewarm oat milk latte, it started to feel like a slow-motion punishment.

I know designers who would have opened every single file manually. I’ve done it myself, more times than I want to admit. But there’s a better way, and once you set it up, you’ll wonder what you were doing with your life before.

Why Doing It Manually Is Actually Costing You Money

Here’s the thing nobody really talks about: repetitive editing tasks aren’t just annoying, they’re financially stupid. If you’re billing hourly, maybe you don’t care. But if you’re on a flat project rate, every minute you spend manually resizing file number 217 is money you’re not making somewhere else.

Beyond the economics, there’s an accuracy problem. When you’re doing the same task 300 times by hand, you will make mistakes. You’ll forget to convert a color profile. You’ll save a file at the wrong resolution. Computers don’t get bored. You do. Batch processing removes human error from the equation on the parts that don’t need a human.

Recording the Action: The 90 Seconds That Do All the Work

Photoshop’s batch processing system runs on Actions, which are basically recorded macros. You do something once, Photoshop remembers every step, and then you tell it to repeat that on an entire folder. Here’s how to actually set one up.

Open one of your target files. Go to Window > Actions to open the Actions panel, then click the Create New Action button (the little page icon at the bottom, next to the trash). Name it something useful, like “Client Export 1200px” rather than “Action 47,” which you will definitely not remember in three weeks.

Hit Record, then do your edits. For the product photo job I mentioned, that was: Image > Image Size (1200x1200px, 300ppi, Resample: Bicubic Sharper), Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask (Amount: 50%, Radius: 1.0px, Threshold: 2), then Edit > Convert to Profile > sRGB IEC61966-2.1, and finally File > Export > Export As (JPG, 85% quality). Hit Stop when you’re done. That’s your action.

One thing to be careful about: if your steps include anything specific to that one file, like a manual selection or a crop based on content, the action will try to replicate that exact selection on every other image, which will cause chaos. Stick to actions that are universal across your files.

Running Batch on a Whole Folder

Now the good part. Go to File > Automate > Batch. In the dialog box, select your Action set and the specific action you just recorded. Under Source, choose Folder and point it at the folder with your images. Under Destination, choose Folder again and point it somewhere else, like a folder called “Exported.” Don’t overwrite your originals. Ever.

Check “Override Action ‘Save As’ Commands” if your action includes an export step, otherwise Photoshop will try to save files back to their original locations and get confused. Check “Suppress File Open Options Dialogs” and “Suppress Color Profile Warnings” to stop Photoshop from asking you questions on every single file. The whole point is that you’re not supposed to be watching this.

Click OK, go get a real coffee, and come back in ten minutes.

When Batch Goes Wrong (and It Will, Once)

I’ll be honest with you. The first time I ran a batch process on a paying client job, I had recorded the action on a file that was already in RGB mode. Half the source files were CMYK. Photoshop chugged through all 340 images and the color conversions were a mess on about 80 of them because my action didn’t include a mode conversion step.

Lesson learned: always record your action starting from a file that represents the worst-case version of your source files. If some might be CMYK, start there. If some might be 16-bit, start there. Run the batch on a small test folder of 5-10 images before you let it loose on everything. That 2-minute test has saved me hours of cleanup.

Also worth knowing: if an error stops the batch mid-run, you can set the error handling in the Batch dialog to “Log Errors to File” instead of “Stop for Errors.” That way it skips the problem file, keeps going, and gives you a log to review afterward instead of making you babysit the whole process.

Droplets: The Even Lazier (Better) Version

If you run the same action regularly, turn it into a Droplet. Go to File > Automate > Create Droplet, pick your action, set a destination folder, and save the Droplet somewhere accessible, like your desktop. Now you can literally drag a folder of images onto that Droplet icon and the whole batch process fires automatically without you opening the Batch dialog at all.

I have three Droplets sitting on my desktop right now: one for web exports, one for print-ready files, and one for client proofs at 72ppi with a watermark baked in. They’ve probably saved me six or seven hours a month, conservatively. At my hourly rate, that’s not nothing.

The real point of all this isn’t that batch processing is clever. It’s that your time has a dollar value, and any task you find yourself doing more than twice deserves to be automated so you can spend that time on the work that actually needs your brain.