Droplet action grinding to a halt after 300 images

[JJ Tiziou]

Hi there kind folks; I'm hoping that someone out there can help me debug this.

I've got a pretty straightforward action that I've used to batch process thousands of files. I recently upgraded to a new Mac Pro, and now am running into a problem where the whole system slows down and then grinds to a halt after ~300 images of the batch have been run.

I'm assuming that this is something to do with cache / scratch disk changes with the new system, and I've played with it a bit but have yet to get it running smoothly.

Am running PS CS5 (12.0.4) w/ latest version of MacOS Sierra (10.12.5)

In Photoshop's settings, I've set the only scratch disk to be an external thunderbolt drive, and I've disabled spotlight indexing of that drive.

What else should I be looking for? The new machine is super fast... until, well, until it isn't.

(And this action isn't particularly complicated – it's literally just opening a jpeg, changing the canvas size, and saving it in another folder)

Many thanks in advance for your time & consideration.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

I doubt I can help you but out of curiosity: When the problem occurs can you determine if the Scratch Disk or the OS Disk have actually filled up?

Have you checked out this page on Photoshop Performance?

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

I seem to recall at least one similar thread either here or over at

Photoshop Family Customer Community

but can’t find it currently, maybe it concerned Batch instead of Droplet.

[JJ Tiziou]

Thanks friend.

It's strange, because it looks like neither disk is filling up, nor are the RAM or CPU maxing out at all.

I played around w/ scratch disk settings some more, no luck yet. It runs ~295 images and just stops.

As a stop-gap measure, I've used Big Mean Folder Machine (a great little util) to break my 6000 images into folders of 275 each, and am processing each individually. But it's just kind of annoying.

[Bo_LeBeau]

i assume you have a new MacBook Pro rather than a Mac Pro.

It seems since you have the latest macOS Sierra 10.12.5 that there may be a problem with running Photoshop CS5 in this setting.

Many people have reported problems with even installing CS5  and other people saying that have installed it and it works ok.

Others have said it work great, but some say it worked great until one day it suddenly didn't.

CS5 is 7 versions out of date and this may be the issue.

You can get the Photographers Plan and get the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom for only $10/month.

There is a 7 day trial period.

Maybe this will solve your problem.

P.S How did you install CS5? Time Machine migration is not recommended and in many cases simply will not work.

Did you install from the original download? Some people have say you need to install an older version of JAVA for this to install correctly.

Use Google to find the details.

Good Luck!

[JJ Tiziou]

Hey there friend, and thanks for chiming in.

And no, it's a mac pro (newish 2013 design cylindrical desktop model)

And yes, I migrated everything over via time machine... what's strange is that CS5 is installed smoothly & working perfectly fine for everything else... and super speedy with upgraded processors and ram and everything else – and the batch processing works fine for the first 200+ images. It just stalls out when it gets closer to 300. Which is weird, because on my older mac pro, I'd easily process thousands at a time.

Am doing smaller batches in the meanwhile, but hoping to debug this. And yes, I know that CS5 is pretty out of date, but I'm holding off as long as I can as I'm not super excited about the subscription model and rarely have need for photoshop. I bought a standalone version of the more recent edition of Lightroom and that suits my needs otherwise.

thx!