Batch or Image Process multiple images at once in Photoshop

Let's now look at adding our watermark to a big bunch of images, rather than just one at a time. So we're going to look at two features, one is called Batch, and one's called Image Processor. They're both great and bad, they both have their quirks; I'll show you both. They pretty much do the same job, but they've got a few extra settings that are worth both exploring. 

So we've created our action in the last video. If you haven't, we'll create an action in a second, but let's say we have created it, and let's go to 'File', and the one that I use the most is under 'Scripts', and it's called 'Image Processor'. And all we say is what images do you want to select. And in your '03 Preferences' there's a folder called 'Batch Examples'. Let's just click 'Open'. So those are the images that we kind of apply it to, we're just doing it to four, but you could do two hundreds, you can include all the sub-folders within a folder. That's where the images I'm getting from, wherever I like them to go, you could save them in the same folder, that's fine, or you can say, I would like to put them in a select folder on my desktop. 

I'm going to call this one 'Image Processor'. Click 'Create', click 'Open'. So that's where I want to get them from, this is where I want to put them to. The cool thing about Image Processor over Batch, we're going to look at comparing the two. One of them is, you don't actually have to apply an action, you can just say, actually I don't want to run an action at all, all I want you to do is save a JPEG, that is a quality of 5, that has a width and height of this, into that particular folder. So all you're using it for is basically resizing and saving as a JPEG. Good for raw images, you might crank this up super high. You might not even worry about the image sizes, just so you got some JPEGs, and bulk process them like this. That's not what I want to do, I want a JPEG, but I also want to run that action, and we're going to use the Watermark text one that we made. Kick back, relax, and 'Run'. It opens, flicks and flashes. And on my desktop I should have Image Processor, JPEG. And there my watermarked images. 

Let's go a little bit further and look at why we'd use Batch over Image Processor. So the weird thing is that, Batch and Image Processor were kind of developed by different people at different times, and they've just kind of hung around both in Photoshop, because they both kind of have little quirks that support each other. So the nice thing about Image Processor is it does-- it just kind of like-- you can just save as a JPEG, you don't have to run an action. Batch is different, it's all about running actions. I like Image Processor because it's really simple. Batch though has a bunch more details which can freak you out, you're like, "Dah, it's not that much." But let's run through it, so same thing. In my default actions is the watermark one I've made. 

Where's the source coming from? I'm going to choose that same source as before. So it's under '03 Preferences', 'Workflow', and it's called 'Batch Examples'. Sometimes you run into images that say-- they open up, and they might have things like color profile warnings, and that might be causing the Image Processor, which we did before, to go bad. So you can click on this and say, actually if it does have that, "Hey, you've used the wrong color space." Just say, "Suppress that for me." The other nice thing this has, is in here you can say-- actually, at the moment it's just going to save them, just like it did for Image Processor, but what I can say is, "Actually I would like it to give it a name. So I'm going to call, this one, like, "Dan's Wedding Feb 2019". 

So you could add-- these aren't wedding photographs, but you get what I mean, I can kind of add, they might be called IMG77421. And you just give them an actual name. Then here, instead of an extension, which is like .jpg, I'm going to say, "I'd like to give it a serial number." Actually I'll just give it a serial letter, so it's going to have A, B, C, D. Then I'm going to put in the extension, which is jpg, and you can kind of see it building up here. Dan's Wedding February, which is this first lot. Then I'm going to add a serial letter at the end, A, B, C, D. Actually you might have hundreds, so you might go for a two digit number at the end there, 01. And actually what I'll do is up here I'll put in a little hyphen afterwards, so that it looks nicer. 

It's not actually going out as a GIF as well. It's just going to use-- it's just an example I've put in there. So it's got some extra pieces, but it's going to run into a little problem. Let's click 'Destination'. Where is it going to go? I'm going to put it on my desktop. This one's going to be called 'Batch'. So Batch is cool, it has extra features, but there's a few little extra things you need to do if you want to use these extra features. Let's click 'OK', it's going to roll through and it's going to say, "Hey, I'm not a JPEG." Because I've got more than one layer, it says, "I need to be a PSD", so I'm going to click 'Save'. 'Save', 'OK'. I could go now and pick JPEG, and click 'Save'. So it's kind of-- it's faster than doing it yourself, but still, you're like, "Man, what happened?" This was meant to be super fast, Dan. I'm going to show you how to get around that. So it works. The only problem is it freaked out because Image Processor has the ability to force it to be a JPEG, just says, "You be a JPEG", whereas this says, I'll save it as whatever it needs to be. And in this case it needs to be a PSD unless you say, be a JPEG. Still with me? 

Batch has extra features, but this quirk. To get round this-- I'm going to delete these. I'll show you how to get around this. So I'm going to open up any image. Because all I really want to do is open up my watermark. Go in here and I need to add a last little kind of thing. I'm going to hit 'Play'. It's going to run through and add it, there's a watermark. I'm going to go down here and I'm going to hit 'Record'. And I need to go to this flyout menu here on the 'Layers Panel', and just say, 'Flatten Image'. So now it doesn't want to be a PSD. Hit 'Stop'. I'm going to go 'File', 'Revert'. Close this down, don't want to mess with that. Back to the same thing, but because I've adjusted my action we have to add that little extra in there. 

Hopefully now I can go to 'Automate', I can go to 'Batch'. All the same things should work. Click 'OK'. And now fix it so it does it. Let's have a look. So there we go. Few little extra features, but we had to do a little extra step there. I want to get even nerdier. Is that okay? If you've already just said Image Processor is fine, let's go on, you're allowed to move on, but if you want to, you're going to hang around, you might not. What I am going to show you is the image resizing. So the problem with using the Image Processor to do image sizing, is that you need to specify the size, which sucks. What I want to say is, I want to say, 500 pixels, but not the height, I just want to say, I want you to be the biggest size, it's 500 pixels, because it's going out to a website. 

I'm a wedding photographer, I've shot loads of images, I want them to be of a normal old size, otherwise they're just going to be too big to upload, but because we've got portrait and landscape, I don't want them to be all 500 pixels wide. I want the longest edge to be 500 pixels wide. Let's get nerdy, so I'm going to open up my image again. And this watermark text here-- before I do Flatten Image what I'd like to do, actually I can do it afterwards, I totally can. So I'm going to hit 'Record'. And what we're going to do is, instead of going to say something like image size and changing that, the problem with it is that, we've got landscape and portrait. So we're going to use this special little feature in here. It's called 'Automate', 'Fit Image'. 

Let's say we want 800 pixels. So I want it to constrain inside of these two. So I'm not going to force it, just, these are the biggest dimensions. That's going to do what we want, let's click 'OK'. Let's hit 'Stop', close this down and not save it. Let's try another go. Let's go to 'File', let's go to 'Automate'. Let's go to 'Batch', so I've turned it into a watermark text. I might have renamed that one to say, resize as well. I might end up having two of them, one that just does the text, and one that does resize as well. I'm going to keep all of this stuff. And I think that's it. Let's click 'OK'. Kick back, relax, I hope. 

Let's go-- I think it was resaved over the top of the ones that I made. So 'Batch', here they are. Let's check the sizes, 'Get Info'. You can see here, it's 800 pixels high. This one here is 800 pixels wide. I hope you followed me there, I think I even got myself lost a little bit. Basically, Image Processor is quick and easy. If you need any more details, like renaming as you go through, Batch is awesome. And that last little thing where we added the Automate, was it called Fit Image? That will work for both Batch and Image Processor. It doesn't matter, the big difference is, one more time to hopefully sync it in for myself maybe. Is that you've got these options, to say, maybe there's some problems when they're opening, and it's causing issues in the Image Processor version. You can say, actually just suppress these things. We can also add the naming here, but both of them don't do a good job of resizing, so we just did that within the action itself using that Fit Image. I think I've convinced myself now. Hopefully you understand too. Let's move on to the next video before my head explodes.