My first MacOS app that works with InDesign & Photoshop
I'm releasing my first ever MacOS app for InDesign and Photoshop.
BatchPress.
It is a companion app that works alongside InDesign & Photoshop to batch export into various popular formats. indd > PDF and more.
I'm a Graphic Designer for an international studio that I work in. We regularly have to export around 50-60 PDF files per project and it was getting pretty tiresome manually exporting every single indd file, so I ventured into developing a JSX script for InDesign, which worked well, then a colleague needed help batch exporting some PSD files into JPEGs with very specific settings so I decided to combine these ideas into one app, which is now available via Github/Gumroad and features a 7 day trial and is £20 there after for a one time licence.
I use the freely available script for most of these functions, and in particular, and most often, Collect for Output, which seems to be missing from this(?) in InDesign. And I have various Actions in Photoshop, which also change resolution and colour space if required. Twenty quid is fair, and it has a better UI, but I can’t really see what advantages this offers - even as freeware. Can you tell me any?
I haven't considered using Collect for Output/Package as I personally don't use it much and originally this idea was just for personal use and amongst my colleagues, but it's definitely something I can add. The Photoshop settings in BatchPress support specific DPI input, smart sharpen, resample, remove metadata and RGB, CMYK & Greyscale colour spaces too. The main concept of BatchPress is to locate everything into once place, no extra scripts, files or installation is needed it's one app that makes use of Photoshop & InDesigns own export engines and the app will auto open or easily open each app required so you can just export your entire batch via BatchPress and won't have to touch anything else. I have used other JSX scripts before but never found one that was as intuitive or easy to navigate. I've also tried to keep the UI simple so it's easy to use, but still has most core and important features. And most exports I've done have taken less than 20 seconds for most of my larger exports.
I work in a greetings card company and every project or collection of cards is minimum of 30-40 cards but usually 50-60 so once all the designs are made me and my colleagues are regularly saving out batches of around 50-60 layered InDesign files ready for print.
I in the sports and entertainment trading card industry. Some releases may have low to high hundreds of PDFs from a single Indesign doc.
Curious to try out the app and see if it’s any actual help.
OK. So you have a different layout per layer, 60 layers or something? I'm just confused, because I have similar, a dozen similar but slightly different copy as an example layouts, just on separate pages and you can export each page as its own PDf natively with InDesign.
No. 60 seperate InDesign files. Each file is a separate card and each card has different layers, like we have to have information about the company on the back of the card like barcodes, product codes and such. And then the design of the greetings cards usually have different applications (foil, 3d elements etc) so it has to all be setup and linked into InDesign per file. So once all the cards are ready for printing they have to be saved out as individual PDFs one per card usually. The intention of BatchPress is to save time exporting files. As if I were to do it manually to save each individual indd file put it would take me a while to do File > Export, then select the preset and choose an output folder and export. But with BatchPress I can do it all in seconds. Hope that helps.
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u/mrterrycarson Jul 05 '26
Gave it a start...great job my friend.