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chrisf87039307
Participant
October 14, 2022
Question

Droplet misses opening/processing files in a batch, but does process them if dropped again

  • October 14, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 343 views

Help - I thought I was loosing my mind, but I've tested carefully and this is definitely happening.

 

Background:  I have a droplet that does a number of manipulations to images that I send into photoshop as .NEF files.  The action outputs .PSD and .JPG files.  I have sent small batches of files into this droplet to produce a total of 31 .psd/.jpg file pairs.  I created another droplet to do another simple manipulation to output a temporary file with a transformation I need for printing.  

 

Problem:  When I select all 31 .jpg files in finder and drop them on my droplet, Photoshop does not output all 31 files.  Some number, but always the same files, are never opened, processed, and output.  I tried to analyze a small section of the batch by selecting the first 6 .jpg files (1.jpg through 6.jpg) and dropping just those onto the droplet.  I noticed that file #1 and #3 in the sequence are definitely never being opened by photoshop.  The history logging to text file feature explicitly shows these are not being opened & closed.  Even if I rename them so that they are ordered differently in the set, these two files do not get opened and processed when I select the batch of 6.  However, if I select those files (1 & 3) either individually or as a pair and drop them on the droplet, it outpus the proper corresponding 1 or 2 output files!  

 

Question:  What on Earth could this be?  How can I debug?  And is there a way to get this to be robust?  Once my batch sizes get bigger, this is going to be a real problem.  THANKS for any help!!

 

I'm on a M1max Mac Photoshop v23.5.1 Apple silicon version

 

Just in case you're still reading:  Below is a copy of the log where I've reverse renamed the files 1.jpg->66.jpg, 2.jpg->55.jpg, etc.  Again, files 1(66) and 3(44) never got opened.  Then I selected only 44 and 66 and dropped them on the droplet again.

2022-10-13 20:53:18 Photoshop launched
2022-10-13 20:53:21 File 11.jpg opened
2022-10-13 20:53:23 File 11.jpg closed
2022-10-13 20:53:23 File 22.jpg opened
2022-10-13 20:53:24 File 22.jpg closed
2022-10-13 20:53:24 File 33.jpg opened
2022-10-13 20:53:25 File 33.jpg closed
2022-10-13 20:53:25 File 55.jpg opened
2022-10-13 20:53:26 File 55.jpg closed
2022-10-13 20:53:28 Photoshop quit
2022-10-13 20:55:48 Photoshop launched
2022-10-13 20:55:52 File 44.jpg opened
2022-10-13 20:55:53 File 44.jpg closed
2022-10-13 20:55:53 File 66.jpg opened
2022-10-13 20:55:55 File 66.jpg closed
2022-10-13 20:55:57 Photoshop quit

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Stephen Marsh
Community Expert
Stephen MarshCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 14, 2022

Not sure, can you compare Batch vs. Droplet?

 

C
chrisf87039307Author
Participant
October 14, 2022

Yes - I hadn't thought of that test.  I setup a batch job on an input directory that contained only the six files to run the action the droplet was utilizing.  This is the same input directory (and it's local to the machine) I was using in my droplet tests.  When I clicked OK, it produced all six files.  I'm unsure if there is a way in Batch to emulate the same selection method that happens when you use Finder to select a group of files to drop on a droplet.  But, this is an interesting result nonetheless.

 

I'd prefer to get the droplet approach working as I'll have to do this action a bunch of times, then not again for several weeks/months.  The droplet is a more "self documenting" in that I can name them "run me first" and "run me last" and I won't have to remember anything about what actions I'm actually trying to batch.  🙂

 

Thanks for the useful test suggestion.  Maybe this helps spur some other ideas.

Chris

 

log:

2022-10-13 22:08:01 Photoshop launched
2022-10-13 22:10:20 File 11.jpg opened
2022-10-13 22:10:21 File 11.jpg closed
2022-10-13 22:10:21 File 22.jpg opened
2022-10-13 22:10:22 File 22.jpg closed
2022-10-13 22:10:22 File 33.jpg opened
2022-10-13 22:10:23 File 33.jpg closed
2022-10-13 22:10:23 File 44.jpg opened
2022-10-13 22:10:24 File 44.jpg closed
2022-10-13 22:10:24 File 55.jpg opened
2022-10-13 22:10:25 File 55.jpg closed
2022-10-13 22:10:25 File 66.jpg opened
2022-10-13 22:10:25 File 66.jpg closed

C
chrisf87039307Author
Participant
October 14, 2022

Stephen, your experiment caused me to of another one.  Instead of using finder to select the files from the directory to drop on the droplet, I basically emulated the batch job exactly.  I navigated one directory higher, grabbed my test directory with the 6 files, and dropped that folder onto my droplet.  It produced 6 files.

 

So dropping the individual files definitely has a different result than dropping the directory containing them.

 

Going to go listen to Scorpion's "I can't explain" a couple of times now.  🙂

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