We have briefly seen in a previous article: Photoshop, begin with action how to create photoshop action to help you with repetitive task. Now we are going to see how to use those actions and the batch function of photoshop to make them even more usefull.

You need to create your action before geting started with batch. See the other artcile to learn how to.
Go to file>automate>batch. You will get a menu like this:

The first bit, called Play allow you to select an action folder and an action in it. I choose the resize action I have made before. After that you can choose on which source you want to aply the action. In this case, all my images are in a folder so I select “Folder”, press “choose” and choose the folder where my images are from.

Done? Ok, now we have to select the destination of our modified file. You can overwritte the one you have opened or choose to save them in a specified folder. By selecting “Folder” your are allowed to some very interesting stuff before saving the new file. So choose “Folder” and pic the folder you want.

Now in the File naming part, you can select whatthe names of your new files should look like. The different drop down list are here to construct the file name. For example if you type”pic” in the first one, select “1 Digit Serial Number” and “extension” you will get something like “pic1.jpg”. The digit will of course be incremented automaticly.

Now press ok and let photoshop do the rest.