Thanks for sharing the solution. Oh the endless mysteries of the Windows operating system :>
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David Marx

set Photoshop to “run as administrator” but DO NOT set the droplet that way.

If you set the droplet that way every time it starts you get the yellow Windows dialog that says ‘allow this program to make changes to your computer?’

I hope that makes sense

Flipping brilliant info you have here. I’ve been looking for that kind of thing for quite a while now….

Thanks so much for sharing this….

(What I was trying to do is I what to put a special frame on all the images, so I set up the actions: open an image, copy & paste to the frame file, move layer down, merge layers, save as, close.)

So after droplet all the files are named as the frame file. I want to be able to keep the original file name and just add “_s” at the end.

Do you have any idea what went wrong with me??

Thank you very much!!

Mike

I tried the test you mentioned above and when i drop the photos onto the droplet icon it opens photoshop and that’s ALL.
I found some forums regarding this on the adobe site as well but never really any resolutions. It just may be that i accept the multi program work flow for now till i can upgrade my entire system. If any other advice comes to mind great if not then i do appreciate your help i have found this site a GREAT source for learning lightroom.

best regards
Charles Hidde

You are messing around with some complicated stuff for a Lightroom novice. There are lots of reasons why your droplets might not work. Option one is that you made a mistake in the action / droplet creation. You can test this possibility though by selecting a folder of images and dragging it over the droplet’s icon. Option two is that the trouble is in your Window’s permissions.

To use Droplets on Vista / Widows 7, make sure that Photoshop and the Droplet.exe are running at the same level of User Access Control. If Photoshop is elevated to run as administrator then the droplet exe must be elevated as well. You will find lots of suggestions on how to solve your Windows permission issues in previous comments on this post and in this help doc from Adobe. As if this wasn’t complicated enough there are also issues with 32-bit / 64-bit compatibility for both Mac and PC users working with droplets.

I don’t mean to discourage you here. Droplets can be a great help and a huge time-saver but this is not easy stuff. If all you are doing is batch noise reduction and light global sharpening then you might be better off learning to do these things within Lightroom’s develop module. Synchronizing changes from one image to another or creating a develop preset might accomplish the same goals without nearly as much frustration.

If all else fails, you could do all of your initial edits and raw development work in Lightroom then export a copy of each image (probably best to save the copy as a .tif file). Open this folder full of files using the Adobe Bridge then use the Image Processor to run your old actions. It means a little bit more work since you have to use both programs but it is a lot less frustrating then figuring out Window’s permissions system or working with Rosetta on the Mac.

Best of luck,

David Marx

Thank you Charles

Found a much easier solution, again from Adobe forums.

After creating the droplet “.exe” file, for example MyPsDroplet.exe

1. Locate the droplet file I have just created with Windows Explorer
2. Right-click on that file and select “Properties”
3. A dialog box will appear with the title MyPsDroplet.exe
4. Checks the checkbox that stated “Run this program as an administrator” and then the “OK” button

It works like a charm.