Editing the photo booth shots taken at a certain event may sometimes be a necessary step. There are various reasons why you may have to resort to a post-processing. For instance, in some cases the lighting may not be ideal, which means you’ll have to adjust the brightness. In other cases, you’ll want to remove unwanted elements from your images. Other times you’ll want to add comments, a date stamp or a logo or resize your photos for easy uploading and sharing.
Setup a Hot Folder for Your Photos
Given that, during a photo booth event, you take a large amount of photographs, the optimal solution would be to resort to an editor with batch processing capabilities such as our own BatchPhoto.
BatchPhoto is a photo booth editor for Windows and Mac developed to aid you speed up your workflow and improve your productivity. In that sense the tool places at your disposal multiple useful features such as the Folder Watch, available with the Enterprise edition. What this feature does is monitor selected folders (hot folders) on your PC, network or websites (using FTP and SFTP) and automatically apply a series of user-defined edits to the newly-added images in those folders.
Just picture the following scenario. You transfer hundreds of RAW images from your latest photo booth event to a monitored folder and within minutes you’ll have them automatically renamed, resized, watermarked and converted to a commonly-used format like JPG or PNG. All of this without having to open BatchPhoto or perform other actions.
Sounds good? Then here’s how to setup a hot folder on your computer in order to fully automate the editing process:
Step 1
In the System Tray area, located in the bottom right corner of your screen, right-click the small BatchPhoto icon and select Show Monitor.
This will take you to the Monitor’s main window where you’ll create a Job. The Job will basically link a series of edits which you’ve set to the monitored folder.
Step 2
In the Monitor’s main window click on Add > Folder Watch, and a new window with the available settings will pop up.
Step 3
Enter a name and description for your Job and set the preferred time interval for the folder scanning.
In the Monitored Folder section click on Browse to select the folder you wish to monitor. Next, in the Custom Profile section, click on Edit Profile to edit the preset profile.
Step 4
Once BatchPhoto is open, you’ll notice in the top-center section three editing steps: Add Photos, Edit Photos and Setup.
You can add a test photo in the first step to preview the changes made. Next go to Edit Photos > Add Filter and select the edits you’d like to apply to your photographs.
Among others, BatchPhoto offers the possibility to add a text, watermark or date stamp to photos, to resize, rotate and crop them, to adjust the brightness, contrast or saturation, apply artistic effects or decorate images with frames and borders.
Step 5
Once you’ve applied your edits, move on to the third step called Setup.
In the Output section click on the Select button to set your output folder. This is the folder where the newly-edited pictures will be saved. The output folder needs to be different than the monitored one.
Step 6
After you’ve created your profile, you need to save it by going in the main menu to File > Save Profile or by simply using Ctrl + S. Next you can close BatchPhoto.
Step 7
Back in the Folder Watch Settings window, where the profile has been automatically updated, simply click on the OK button.
Now BatchPhoto will start analyzing the monitored folder. When it will detect newly-added pictures, it will automatically edit them according to your configuration and save them in the Output folder.
You can download a fully-featured trial version of BatchPhoto here.
