Review : BatchPhoto

Hello folks,

A few weeks ago I was contact by Mike who is the founder of BatchPhoto asking if I wanted to look at version 5 of BatchPhoto. I said that I would be happy to do so but would need some more information on what the product does and who the target market is. Mike has kindly obliged and has sent me a Not For Resale license to facilitate the review.

What is BatchPhoto?

The name actually tells you what it does. You select a batch or group of photos, select a filter or filters to apply to the photos, decide where you want the updated images to go, and then run the process. Really that’s it in four simple steps.

Who is BatchPhoto For?

There are many people taking pictures who don’t want to spend time in an editing tool and do not see a value in powerful but costly perpetual license or subscription license products. These folks want simple, quick, minimal fiddling and low cost.

So who are these folks. An obvious fit are those who loving snapping pictures with smartphones and want to apply simple creative effects without having to learn the ins and outs of how to make them. While a seasoned editor might know how to insert a picture frame around a picture using a tool like Photoshop, there are plenty of users who would like to be able to click picture frame, and then process and be done.

Another candidacy are any photo takers who need to generate simple content for the web very quickly. Real estate photographers are a group who like this kind of tool. Take a bunch of pics of a property, quickly embed contact information and a realtor watermark and get the images online for prospective customers to see.

Who is Not a Likely Customer

Candidly, anyone who edits using a dedicated tool such as Lightroom Classic or Photoshop or Capture One and who treats each image as its own project is probably not looking for a simple batching tool. That’s ok, because folks like this (and this is where I sit myself) are not the primary market. We LIKE editing, whereas for lots of others, it’s a must do, rather than a want to do.

How Does It Work

You launch the application from your local hard drive. You buy a license and then download the Windows or Mac installer. There is a short free trial available to see how the tool fits for you and I encourage that kind of purchase intelligence option wherever offered.

Step One

In the first step you add photos to the current batch. You can simply drag them from folders on your locally attached drive. I am going to recommend that you use images from a locally attached drive rather than a NAS because the add process just makes a link to the original file and if it has to fetch a batch from a network store, performance does lag. This step does offer the option to see previews of the images, but I want to address previews specifically when I get to file type support.

Step Two

In the second step you add the filters that you want to apply to the batch. Remember that word, because batch means do the same thing to ALL the images in the batch. It is not a one at a time editor and that should be clear from the product name.

There are lots of filters available, broken into multiple categories of annotate, transform, touch up, fix and decorate. The filters are all clearly named. Just remember that this is batch work, so many filters have no adjustable parameters and those that do tend to be simple ones applicable at a global batch level. For those coming from a tool that offers massive granularity, this may look austere but it is doing what it is designed to do.

Annotate lets you had a text block, or a logo, or a watermark, the same to all the photos in the batch, very handy to add branding quickly as a realtor might for example.

Transform offers filters to flip, rotate, resize, crop and a useful one that produces thumbnails for web stores and listings. Again, the same filter is applied identically to all the images in the batch.

The Touch-Up group offers brightness, contrast, colour balance, sharpening and denoise functions. These tend to be the kinds of things that are batch changes usually for a set of pictures.

The Fix group is where you find the creative effects, like blur, convert to B+W, oil paint, swirl and wave. The filters do what they are called but I cannot go into much detail because these are not things that I do.

The Decorate section is where you add borders, frames, shadows and the like.

Step Three

In this step called Setup, you set up what format you want the changed images to be stored in and where you want them to go. There is a very long list of file type options, but as JPEG and PNG are likely to be the most common ones, be assured that they are there. However the breadth and scope of output formats is really very impressive for folks who need that kind of flexibility

Step Four

This is the process step. When you select it, the photos that were added to the batch in step one, get the filters selected in step two applied and the output formats and storage location set in step three get processed. A simple dialog provides guidance on how the process is going and when it is done. There’s an option to open the target folder once the processing is done.

File Types

BatchPhoto works with a variety of opening file formats and there is support for a lot of formats where the creator ceased support or went out of business. I did not and could not check every possible format. It worked with files from my iPhone, from my Nikons and from all my Canons excepting those using the CR3 format. Mike advised that they hope to add CR3 support next year. That’s the only missing that I noticed.

Best Outcomes

The smaller the source file that better the performance. I found that using CR2 and NEF RAW files that things moved along so long as I did not use the Preview functions in either step 1 or step 2. Step 1 didn’t matter but I found that rendering a preview of the filter effect on a RAW file could take over 40 seconds per image reviewed. For my workflow that’s a show stopper. Without using previews things moved along fine.

When I switched to using JPEGs as my source, performance improved significantly. Previews rendered in reasonable speed in both step 1 and step 2, with more time required in step 2 depending on the complexity of and the number of filters used. The actual processing was quite good and the outputted images looked as expected.

Conclusions

I want to be respectful to Mike and BatchPhotos. I’m not their target market as I am a very demanding editor and cannot remember the last time I did anything as a batch. I have tried to not let my biases influence this short review. For the audience it is built for, the product looks solid. You can find out more at the company site There are three versions available for purchase, Home at $34.95 which is super basic, Pro at $59.95 which is where I think most buyers will be happiest and Enterprise at $149.95 which is way beyond what regular users will need but is suited to a business that deals with a ton of image content.

The license is perpetual and you can download for Windows or Mac. Each license is for a single install and if asked I would advise the company to change that to allow installation on up to two computers belonging to the licensee for Home or Pro. That’s what Adobe, Corel and most others do. Support is by ticket or opening a post on a forum. For those accustomed to a tool like Lightroom, please be clear that BatchPhoto is a pixel level editor. Once a change is written to a file, it cannot be undone. So never overwrite your originals and that will not be an issue.

For the people that the product is built to serve, it strikes me as a good offering. If you shop at B&H Photo Video, please do so through the link on the main page. Feel free to post a comment or submit a question. Until next time, peace.