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case you'll need to click on the Choose… button below and select a folder of images. The following items in the Source section will only show if the ‘Folder’ or ‘Bridge’ options are selected. These allow you to decide how to handle files that have to be opened first in Photoshop before applying an action. The ‘Override Action “Open” Commands’ is a tricky one to understand (see side panel), but basically you'll want to leave this unchecked most the time. Only check the ‘Include All Subfolders’ option if you want to process all the subfolders within the selected folder. If you are processing a bunch of raw files and wish to override seeing the ACR dialog then do check the ‘Suppress File Open Options Dialogs’ option. Lastly, if you want to prevent the Missing Profile and Profile Mismatch dialogs appearing when you batch process images, then check the ‘Suppress Color Profile Warnings’ option. As a consequence of doing this, if there is a profile mismatch, Photoshop checks what you did previously. If you previously chose to keep the image in its own profile space, then this is how the images will be batch processed. If there is no profile present, Photoshop checks to see if your previous preference was set to: Ignore, Assign a profile, or Assign and convert to the working space, and acts accordingly.

In the Destination section you have three options. If you choose ‘None’, Photoshop processes the selected files and leaves them open. If you choose ‘Save and Close’, Photoshop does just that and overwrites the originals, and if you choose ‘Folder’, you'll need to click on the Choose… button to select a destination folder.

Now it might so happen that the action you have selected to run the batch process with may contain a Save or Save As command that uses a specific file format and format settings, and this action step will contain a recorded Save destination. It might be the case that the Save destination is an important part of the action, but if the destination folder no longer exists, the action will fail to work (besides, you can specify a destination folder within the Batch dialog itself). So in the majority of instances, where the action contains a Save instruction, I recommend you check the ‘Override Action “Save As” Commands’ checkbox. If the action does not contain a Save or Save As command, then leave this option unchecked.

If a folder is selected as the destination, you have six editable fields at your disposal. You can use any combination you like, but if you select a custom file extension option this must always go at the end. As you edit the fields, you will see an example of how the naming will work in the ‘Example:’ section above. The file naming options let you define the precise naming and numbering structure of the batch processed files (Figure 15.7 shows the complete list of naming and numbering options).

Figure 15.7 The Batch interface naming and numbering options.

Customized file naming

It is easy to customize the File Naming with your own fields. In Figure 15.6, I created a batch process where the images were renamed ‘Bookimage_’ followed by a three-digit serial number, followed by an underscore ‘_’ and with the date expressed as: day; month; and year. Note that the numbering was set to start at ‘101’. So in this example the file name structure would be something like: Bookimage_101_190908.

Figure 15.6 This shows an example of the Batch Action dialog set to apply a pre-recorded action. The ‘Windows’ box has been checked here to ensure file naming compatibility with PC systems.

Error handling

If ‘Stop For Errors’ is selected, this will halt the batch processing in Photoshop any time an action trips up over a file for some reason. You can prevent this by selecting the ‘Log Errors to File’ option instead. This allows the batch processing to complete, but creates a log report of any files that failed to process.

Cross platform droplets

You can name a droplet anything you like, but to be PC compatible you should add a .exe extension. If someone sends you a droplet that was