Batch Action Crashes After 7,077 files?

Question

Hi there, I have a problem with a batch process I'm trying to use to add watermarks. The "watermark" is very simple - plain grey text. However, I have 1.2 million files to process and Photoshop crashes, usually after processing 7,077 files. On average that's only about 450MB, all 1280x720 png files. These are in separate folder of about 55k each. I've tried this on two different computers. Both have drivers and Photoshop up-to-date. I have tried turning off the option to use the video card, as suggested by the troubleshooting guide. I've turned off autosave and tried adjusting the memory limit up and down. No change.
 
The computer does not freeze. It's just Photoshop that stops. There are no errors in the log file, and it doesn't give me a specific error. It just gives me the option to send or not send a crash report.
 
Please help. I don't want to have to restart this process every hour or so 170 times. If it's important my primary system is Windows 10, 32 GB memory with an Intel i7-8700k and a GTX 1080ti. I don't think the video card has anything to do with it since I turned off the option to use it to process. I'll try anything, thank you.

Stephen Marsh · Accepted Answer

I have not tested on your volume of images. The other suggested apps can do what you want and have far less overhead than Photoshop, but they too could fall over, I don’t know. The reason that I suggested them was that they do what you require without all of the baggage that comes with Photoshop.

Here is an example from XnConvert, which is a GUI so it will have some overhead over and above a CLI tool (XnConvert can output code for use in the CLI based nConvert, which may have better performance):

OK, I performed a very simple test. I did not close open apps or reboot the computer before the test – nor did I attempt to fine tune Photoshop for better batch performance, so perhaps the results could have potentially been better.

I created 500 png files at 1280 x 720 px in size, approx. 2mb each.

I setup an action in Photoshop to add a text layer, flatten and save as PNG. I then setup the batch and timed it. The run took around 28 minutes 40 seconds to complete the batch of 500 images. This was on a Mac with an SSD.

I then went into my Windows 10 virtual machine that is running on the same Mac, so there is the overhead of running two OS at the same time. I then used XnConvert to perform the same action of watermarking the same 500 source images with text. The run was approximately 3 minutes. I could have downloaded and installed XnConvert on the Mac, however it was already installed in Windows so ran the test there. I doubt that the deciding factor is the OS, it is the program. The right tool for the job, horses for courses and all that.

Photoshop: 28:40

XnConvert: 03:02

There is no guarantee that XnConvert will crash or stop processing after processing thousands of images, however on this simple test I am backing XnConvert over Photoshop for performance and reliability of batching many images with a simple addition of a text watermark. It would also be informative to run the command line nConvert, ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick tools as well as they don’t have the processing overhead of a GUI, however they usually have a longer/steeper learning curve for installation and use.

Stephen Marsh · Answer

I would look into using a different tool for this “industrial volume” of images, such as ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick or XnConvert or nConvert etc.

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