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I have created a few actions to add border and guide marks on images.

Depending on the border required, a different action button is used. Part of these actions are canvas size changes, image flips, etc.

Every time an action gets called, each of these steps (flips, canvas size changes) gets animated on screen. Is it possible to disable these animations and apply all the steps without visual progress from one step to the next?

I hope my description above doesn't sound convoluted

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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It sounds to me like you have Step by step selected in the action playback options and maybe Allow tool recording, or perhaps both.

You need to go to the Actions panel and:

  1. Click the menu icon at the top right corner
  2. Uncheck Allow Tool Recording
  3. Go to playback options... ( jump to the second image below this one ↓ ) enter image description here
  4. Select Accelerated, if it's not selected. enter image description here

With these settings the actions run as fast as they possibly can.

I forgot to mention that if you have recorded an action that uses full step by step animation recorded by Allow tool recording, just disabling this option is not enough. You'd need to remake that part of the action with it disabled.

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  • Is there any value is reducing history levels and changing default snapshot on open when running large-volume batches?
    – horatio
    Commented Apr 4, 2014 at 14:48
  • @horatio I'd say no. Given that they are cleared when you close a document and how it's very unlikely that you have so many files open with bunch of history states that it would have any impact. Even if you'd be able to get yourself in such situation, I believe that having multiple large files or files with hundreds of layers open when you run a batch is a lot likelier and would have way bigger impact than history states and snapshots ever could. I don't really know for a fact, though.
    – Joonas
    Commented Apr 4, 2014 at 17:32
  • I mean, try to open many large files (or just imagine doing so). Open enough to make something like image resize or cropping to take a while to process when performed on just one of those files. Then open one file and try to replicate the speed reduction with snapshots and history states.
    – Joonas
    Commented Apr 4, 2014 at 17:40
  • Thank you Joonas. My settings already had accelerated playback selected. Apparently, for large files, it'll still show some steps. I guess that's the best it'll be able to do. Also, I don't see 'tool recording' option in Photoshop CS3
    – user21447
    Commented Apr 9, 2014 at 21:25
  • @user21447 Not sure if you are using open documents as the source or not, but with bunch of large files it would be best to use files or folders as the source. I'm afraid there's not much you can do, maybe if you feel that it's your computer that's causing it to be sluggish, you could try to close some other applications when running batches. || Right, I believe Tool recording was introduced in cs5'ish... Maybe cs6
    – Joonas
    Commented Apr 9, 2014 at 22:50
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Whenever I run batches in Photoshop, I reduce the program's window to it's minimum size, thus effectively 'hiding' the images being processed, which speeds up batch processing considerably. That's been my experience, anyway. And that experience has been on Windows machines, not Macs, FWIW.

There was a time when I could simply minimize the window to the task bar, but some time ago, Photoshop started popping back up to it's maximum window size when opening the next image to batch process. So I started manually reducing the window borders to the minimum size allowed. Hope this helps!

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For anyone interested, here's another method for Windows (tested on CC 2018).

Start your batch process as usual. Then, press Win + M, effectively minimizing all windows on screen and not allowing Photoshop to come up again.

You can check on your taskbar the file names of your batch.

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