Scripts - Image Processor uses up to 200GB RAM and crashes

I just ran a test with Image Processor, from a folder of 300 PSDs saving to jpeg in a different folder. These are all files from Nikon D810, Sony a7r III, Sony a7r V. In other words, pretty big files.

There was no memory buildup, no excessive scratch disk usage.

Here's memory at the end of the process, at the same level as it had been throughout:

...and here's a very modest 4.5 GB scratch file, also at the end of the process:

It's clear that the whole process is one by one image, one closes, the next opens. So memory is reused and the requirement doesn't rise from what's needed for one image.

I can see two possible factors here: one, the the source images are on an external drive. Maybe it's necessary to cache everything before processing, I don't know (but I doubt that).

Two, this is MacOS specific.

For processing raw files to jpeg, I would never use Image Processor, I'd use Lightroom. And I know from experience that it will handle high volume exports without any issues, so there's no need to test that.

And Lightroom Export even better.

@Jeromey Shannon – ACR has a batch save feature, which is better suited to the task.

Thanks everyone. Seems like this issue won't be going away any time soon. I will keep this in mind when processing raw photos. I'd like to keep this process in the Adobe ecosystem, Media Encoder might be a solution, but I like the fact that Image Processor will keep folder structures when batch converting. Maybe Lightroom does something similar, I'm not a photographer myself so I've never used it. I'll keep looking for other solutions. Maybe having 1TB of RAM in the future will be the fix. 🙂 

See https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/image-processor-causes-memory-to-run-out/td-p/12577858 for what appears to be the same issue.

One possible solution could be to change History preferences from whatever to ONE before running Image Processor.

Be sure to return the History pref back to default or user selected number of histories.

I'm using the default settings for JPG at 8 Quality. It would be great if PS released the RAM every 100 images or so. Would make more sense than me having to split the folders into smaller batches. If I could manually make a selection of files rather than only selecting a folder that would work to. There are other batch conversion methods out there as well so maybe Photoshop isn't the best option for us. This was the first method when I Googled how to easily batch convert images for proxy use.

Hi @Jeromey Shannon PS Does not release RAM when doing this process until it is finished. Running such a large batch will cause memory bloat depending on the size of the files.

I would split this up in to "digestible" chunks to prevent lock ups.

Are you running a script when processing?