Photoshop Droplets: The Automation Tool You're Probably Ignoring

Photoshop Droplets: The Automation Tool You're Probably Ignoring

A few years back I took on a product photography contract for a mid-sized e-commerce brand. Three hundred SKUs, white background, consistent color profile, two export sizes each. Six hundred files total. The client needed them in 48 hours. I’d built the action sequence over the weekend before, tested it on a sample set, and felt good going into Monday morning. What I hadn’t planned for was how many times I’d need to manually trigger that action, folder by folder, because I’d set it up as a standard batch process through Photoshop’s automation menu rather than as a droplet.

Photoshop Droplets: The Batch Processing Tool You're Probably Ignoring

Photoshop Droplets: The Batch Processing Tool You're Probably Ignoring

A few years back I had a client send over 500 product shots on a Friday afternoon. New colorway launches for an e-commerce catalog, all needing the same sequence: resize to 2000px on the long edge, convert to sRGB, sharpen with a specific Smart Sharpen value, save as JPEG at quality 9 into a web-ready folder. Same thing, 500 times. I had a weekend. I also had a droplet I’d built in about 40 minutes the month before.