Lightroom Tutorial: How to Batch Process Photos to Add A Watermark

Today I'm going to show you how to Batch Process Photos in Lightroom.  One of my main motivations for doing this is to easily watermark photos for my blog.  I also setup things to easily export iPad photos, print photos for upload to Pictage, etc.

If you followed along on last week's Photoshop tutorial, I showed how to create a Photoshop Action that will add a watermark to any photo no matter what size, orientation or ratio.  http://blog.celebrationpackages.com/2010/08/tutorial-how-to-create-watermark-action.html  We'll build on that action here and I'll show you how you can run it from Lightroom to batch process a bunch of photos.

First thing we need to do is create a new Action in Photoshop.  I'm going to call mine "Watermark Droplet".



Once you create that Action you'll want to record a few things.  While your action is recording, run the Watermarking Action we created last week.  This will do everything we setup to create the Watermark. 



After that, use the Save for Web command.



What I do here is I select a folder where I know my output files will be.  So every time I run the batch, I know where my output files will end up. 



Then you'll want to record closing the file. You should end up with an Action that looks like this.



Now that we're done recording our Action, we'll want to turn it into a Droplet.



Select the Action we just created and make sure you set Destination to "None". This is because our Action already saved the file. Save the droplet to somewhere you'll remember, like your desktop. 



OK, now we're going to switch over to Lightroom. Pick a photo and export it.




Select the SAME folder you used to save your Action files to in Photoshop.  This will reduce clutter because once Lightroom exports JPEGs, Photoshop will use them and re-save them right there.  You can either do your resizing here in Lightroom or in Photoshop.  Honestly, I haven't tried to see which is quicker but for now I do my resizing in Lightroom because that will give Photoshop a smaller file to work with and theoretically make things quicker. 



Under Post-Processing, click on the select bar right next to "After Export".  You'll see a selection menu pop up.  Click on "Go to Export Actions Folder Now". 



This will open up a new window with the location of where Lightroom stores its Post-Processing pieces. Once you have this window open, open another window and find where you saved your droplet.  Then copy that Droplet to the "Export Actions" folder. 



Once you've done that, you can close both windows. When you go back into Lightroom, you'll see your Droplet show up in the Export Options. Now all you have to do is select your Droplet Action and hit "Export!"




Once you have your Export Action setup in Lightroom, whenever you want to add a watermark to your images, select the images you want watermarked and export them with "Post-Processing" set to use your Droplet Action.

I create several Export Presets in Lightroom. One of them is to create Web-friendly images using my Watermark Action. Another preset I have setup is for resizing photos to load onto my iPad. Below, you can see my settings for that where I have the image optimized for iPad view and save them to a folder that automatically syncs down to my iPad. This makes it VERY quick and easy to load photos from a wedding onto my iPad to hand out while I display my slideshow.



You can also see some of the other Presets I have setup such as Pictage, ShowIt, files to burn to a DVD, etc. Hopefully you found this tutorial helpful!