Batch processing in Topaz Photo AI

I desperately, desperately need batch processing in Topaz Photo AI. I actually thought this was already possible when I bought it, and the major reason why I bought it was because I often need to upscale a lot of photos. During the trial, I saw that you could open multiple images at once, but when I actually got the product I realized I had to click every image individually for the autopilot to run on them, and doing more than ten or so to 4x causes Photo AI to crash. (Some kind of Save and Close option would probably fix that?)

I actually bought Photo AI to replace what I was already using to upscale images, since its results are so amazing, but it is so slow in terms of my workflow for upscaling multiple images that I end up using my old solution because I can just set it and let it run without having to constantly click on each image.

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I believe it is already there, if you run the executable with --help you will see the options.

Well, that is great news! But I have no idea how to do what you’re suggesting. There’s nowhere to type in the program, and I have seen nothing in any documentation telling me how to do so.

Does “run the executable” mean run the program with the command line or something?

Well, after some googling I figured out how to run a program from the command line, but not how “–help” ties into that. Also tried the Run window. I am very lost, can you please give more detailed instructions?

If this is possible, it is very far from user friendly.

ProgramName - -Help on the command line no space between the dashes

That doesn’t seem to work?

(My first few tries didn’t work, sorry, but I got something to happen with the last command.)

Transcription of screenshot below:

: \Program Files \ Topaz Labs LLC\Topaz Photo A1)" Topaz Photo A1" --help
: \Program Files \ Topaz Labs LLC\Topaz Photo AI>Options :
--cli: Required to access CLI mode, otherwise images are treated as if passed by an external editor.
--output, -o: Output folder to save images to. If it doesn't exist the program will attempt to create it.
--overwrite: Allow overwriting of files. THIS IS DESTRUCTIVE .
--recursive, -r: If given a folder path, it will recurse into subdirectories instead of just grabbing top level file
s.
File Format Options:
--format, -f: Set the output format. Accepts jpg, jpeg, png, tif, tiff, dng, or preserve. Default: preserve
Note: Preserve will attempt to preserve the exact input extension, but RAW files will still be converted to DNG.
Format Specific Options :
--quality, -q: JPEG quality for output. Must be between and 100. Default: 95
--compression, -c: PNG compression amount. Must be between and 10. Default: 2
--bit-depth, -d: TIFF bit depth. Must be either 8 or 16. Default: 16
--tiff-compression: -tc: TIFF compression format. Must be "none", "Izw", or "zip"
Note: 1 zw is not allowed on 16-bit output and will be converted to zip.
: \Program Files \ Topaz Labs LLC\Topaz Photo

I’m running Windows 10 Home if that matters.

I guess looking through this I see some options, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with these, and none of them seem to apply to my problem, which is that I simply want Topaz to run autopilot on multiple images at once without me having to touch each one, and to do more than a couple images without crashing.

Photo AI does let you import many photo’s and run the AutoPilot. All well and good, but the AI does not do a great job on “seeing” the photo issues and if you want to enhance / etc that AutoPilot does not select - that is a very slow and laborious process. There needs to be in preferences to check off all that you want the AI to do - enhance / graphics mode, Sharpen / whatever your level is, and more.

Seems like a step back having to click on each file to get the proper settings you want to achieve and “AutoPilot” is not that great.

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Okay, then maybe I am experiencing a bug. Here is my process.

  • Set the AutoPilot to “Enhance 4x.” Nothing else. (Originally, I would ask it to also apply some low resolution filters, but I gave up on that just to get this to work.)
  • Open any number of photos. (Started with around 60, but it kept crashing after around ten so I started trying to do smaller batches.)
  • AutoPilot begins to run on first image. Image is enhanced 4x. Great, this is exactly what I wanted it to do!
  • But it doesn’t go on to do any other images unless I click on each one individually.
  • When I click on each one individually, Photo AI crashes after doing anywhere from 5-10 images. Since it doesn’t save any of them after enhancing, I don’t have any upscaled images.

Basically, it would help GREATLY if Photo AI knew to move to the next image and saved each image when it was done (much like Photoshop does when running an action.) Even if the processing itself took a long time, I just want to be able to run AutoPilot on multiple images. If I have to interact and click buttons for every image, I might as well just do this myself in Photoshop. And without this feature, this program is unfortunately not very useful.

I am a graphic designer and it’s very common for clients to send me low res images I have to get up to 300ppi, and the reason I bought Photo AI in the first place was mainly so I could solve that problem, and all the other stuff was a fun bonus for me to play with for my personal projects.

So I guess the feature request still stands. We really need some kind of batch processing.

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Hi Folks, it is now 31 October (in Australia). Is batch processing still an issue in Photo AI? I would love to put about 200 raw photos through it to fix any noise and sharpening issues. I will then put these denoised and sharpened photos into Lightroom to do the rest of the processing. Can I do that yet?

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Test it, I believe it works.

I think it does work now, (or at least, it’s not crashing for me anymore), but there’s still a couple issues.

  1. You do still have to click each image individually for it to process.
  2. When multiple images are open, so you can’t click on more than the first fifteen images or so to start the processing. (There’s no scroll function on the bottom row of images, or at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to do it. I tried scrolling with my mouse wheel or using arrow keys on my keyboard. But I’m only able to click on the number of images that will fit at once on my computer screen.)

For point number two, it would be extremely useful to be able to scroll through the open images or put in some kind of arrow to proceed to the next image. I’ve tried using the scroll wheel on my mouse and arrows on my keyboard, but neither of those seem to do anything. If I want to go past the last image that fits on my screen, the only way I’ve figured how to do it is to shrink the window with the last image selected. This moves the image queue over a bit, allowing more images to be selected.

Basically, I think technically batch processing is working, for me at least, but it’s still very awkward to use and definitely needs to be streamlined a bit. It’s actually faster to do batches of 15 or so images at a time rather than 200 purely because you don’t have to shrink and regrow the window constantly to click on a couple more images.

I really, really wish Photo AI just had an option to “run autopilot on all open images” or all images in a folder or something. It’s very annoying to have to click on each image individually. Photoshop does this a lot better—pick an action to run, tell it to run, and it will do the action in the background without you having to interact at all. Much nicer than to open several images, click them all individually, save the images yourself, and then load another batch (or shrink and regrow the window so you can click on more images).

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Marie, thanks for your last email re batch processing with Photo AI. Like you, I want to select all of the photos (eg 200 photos) and have Photo AI process all of them without me having to intervene. So I start it running, go to sleep for 8 hours, and when I wake up it is all done. Sounds like it isn’t there yet. Hopefully, very, very soon!
AIDon, can you ask the developers when this might be possible? Thanks.
Cheers, Rex

For what you are trying to do you need to use the command line interface as per the “–help” details.

AiDon: Thank you, and I really do appreciate your help, but I still have no idea how to use the command line --help. I had to learn how to even use command line to try to follow your earlier instructions. I finally was able to get it to give me a bunch of text that looks like a list of options, which I pasted in an earlier post. But I have no idea what to do with this list. There is no documentation instructing me on how to use it. (If there is, please let me know where to find it.) I am not a computer programmer, and while I’m willing to try to learn some stuff it honestly it feels a bit disingenuous to pay a lot of money for software that apparently requires learning command line to perform one of its features, especially when there are no instructions anywhere on how to do that.

If the program is already capable of doing this, is it not possible to 1) Provide a button in the program somewhere that runs the operation in command line, and/or 2) Provide detailed instructions on the website or in the official documentation on how to do this in command line, assuming that the user has never touched command line in their life and has no idea how to use it?

When in doubt, try YouTube! Here is a video on Batch Processing Raw Files in Lightroom using Photo AI.

Note that I haven’t tried this yet, so I can’t comment on how well it works.

The best thing to do is raise a support request at the main website and they will be able to walk you through bith using the command line execution and the Photo AI options.

I agree with you though that this has been poorly thought through as there should be an option to assist all types of users. For example, the application could create a batch file that can be run after the user selects the options they want to use.

I’m using Topaz Photo AI.app v 1.0.10 on macOS, and it is possible to batch process multiple photos at one time, but the feature is not where you think it should be!

When you open multiple images at once, they appear in a “strip” at the bottom of the window. You can click on those images one at a time and see the effects of the Photo AI processing on that image. It’s when you go to save the images that Photo AI processes all the photos in batch mode.

So, it works like this:

  1. Open multiple image files.
  2. Click on individual images to select them and see the effects of the AI processing
  3. (I haven’t verified this) Adjust the settings for the individual image.
  4. Save the files (the button will be labeled something like “Save 34 images”); Photo AI will process each image according to either the default settings or the settings you adjusted for a particular image before saving the results.

I have used Photo AI in batch mode in Lightroom and it worked well. I used the AutoPilot setting for the first photo. One thing I don’t know - For each of the other photos in the batch - does it create a individualized AutoPilot setting for each photo, or does it create an AutoPilot setting for the 1st photo and then use that same setting for the remaining photos? I am assuming it creates individualized settings for each photo, but I haven’t read that anywhere. So I am not sure.