Why a folder is not just one picture repeated
Marking one photograph is typography: you look at it, you move the wording until it sits right, you save. Marking three hundred is a different exercise, because you cannot look at three hundred. Everything that is easy about the single-file case — judging the size by eye, nudging the position, checking the colour against the background — stops scaling at about file four.
So the run is built around a different question: what has to be true of a setting for it to be correct on files you have not seen? Three answers, and all three are in the inspector rather than in advice.
- Every size is a proportion, never a pixel count. The mark's width is a percentage of each picture's width and the inset is a percentage of its shorter edge, so a folder of mixed sizes gets marks that are the same size relative to their frames.
- Nothing depends on the first file's shape. A portrait and a landscape given the same bottom-right placement both get a mark the same distance in from their own two edges.
- Anything that cannot be honoured is reported rather than approximated. A frame narrower than the mark at that percentage gets a clamp and a line in the list, not an overflow nobody notices until the ZIP is open.
How the run goes
| Order | Names sorted the way a file manager sorts them, with digits compared as numbers. |
|---|---|
| At a time | Up to four files, or one fewer than the cores the browser reports — whichever is smaller. |
| Memory | A file is opened, marked, written into the archive and released before the next one in that lane starts. Peak use is the number of lanes, not the size of the folder. |
| Naming | {name}-wm, {name}_marked, marked-{name}, or the original name untouched. A collision inside the archive gets a numbered suffix rather than losing a file. |
| Archive | A stored ZIP, assembled as each file lands, handed to your downloads when the last one is in. |
| The list | One line per file: what it was called, what it is called now, how big it is — or why it was left out. |
The completion line is a count, not a reassurance: the number of files written, the number left out, and the size of the archive. If four were skipped it says four were skipped, and the four lines saying why are directly underneath it.
Get file one right before you run four hundred
The first picture in the queue is opened and shown so the mark can be judged against a real photograph from this very folder rather than against a description of one. It is worth spending a minute on it, because every saving from a run comes out of that minute. Five things to look at:
- Is it legible at the size the pictures will actually be seen? Zoom the browser out to roughly the width the pictures will appear at online. A mark that reads at full size and disappears at feed size is not doing the job.
- Does the colour survive both halves of the picture? White wording vanishes over a white product and black wording vanishes over a shadow. An outline, or a shadow, fixes this more reliably than picking a cleverer colour.
- Is the corner you chose empty in every picture, or only in this one? If the answer is only in this one, repeating it across the frame is the honest choice.
- Is the output format the one you want? Setting it to keep the original means a folder of PNGs stays PNG and a folder of JPGs stays JPG, which is usually right and is occasionally very wrong.
- Does the naming template leave you able to tell the marked file from the original at a glance? If you save into the same folder with the original name, you will not be able to.
Save the setting once it is right. It is kept in this browser under whatever you call it, and the next folder starts where this one finished.
What gets left out
A run reports rather than guesses. Four things put a file on the skipped list, and each of them names itself in the line it writes.
- A file over 120 MB, which is past the point where opening it is a reasonable thing to attempt in a tab.
- A picture past about 100 megapixels — 40 on an iPhone or iPad — which is the hard ceiling rather than the soft one.
- A picture past the soft ceiling when the lighter-copy switch above the run is turned off. Turned on, it is worked on at a reduced size and the line says so.
- A file the browser will not decode at all: a broken download, a RAW file with a photographic extension, a PDF that was renamed.
- How many pictures can go in one run?
- Five hundred. That figure is a judgement about how much a browser tab will hold rather than a measurement on your machine, and a run of four hundred raw conversions on a five-year-old phone is a different proposition from four hundred web JPGs on a desktop. If a run stalls, halve it: two archives are no worse than one.
- Will the same setting look right on pictures of different sizes?
- That is the whole reason the size is a percentage of each picture's own width and the inset is a percentage of its shorter edge. A folder holding 1200-pixel exports next to 6000-pixel originals gets marks that occupy the same proportion of each frame, which is what looking right means here.
- What order do the files come back in?
- The order a file manager would show them in — names compared with the numbers read as numbers, so photo-9 comes before photo-10. Several files are worked on at once, but they are written into the archive strictly in that queue order, so a sequence out of a camera comes back as a sequence.
- What happens to a file the browser cannot open?
- It takes its own line in the list with the reason, and the run keeps going. Stopping four hundred files because of number forty-one would be the wrong trade every time, and a run that quietly dropped it would be worse still.
- Can I give each file a different position?
- Not in a run. One mark, one placement, every file — that is what makes the result predictable and what makes a saved setting worth keeping. A picture that needs its own treatment is a single-file job.
- Does the archive get compressed?
- No, and that is deliberate. JPG, PNG and WebP are already compressed; squeezing them again costs seconds per file and saves a fraction of a percent. The ZIP is a container here, not a compressor.