Conditional action scripting for Photoshop power users

The moment it becomes a problem: a retoucher or production designer has a folder of 300 product images with inconsistent backgrounds, lighting, and dimensions. They want to automate the batch — but Photoshop's native Actions can't branch. If the image is portrait, do X. If the background is white, skip step Y. If the layer count exceeds 5, flatten first. None of that is possible inside the Actions panel without writing ExtendScript, which requires knowing JavaScript and navigating Adobe's sparse, decade-old API documentation.

This gap persists because Adobe's Actions system is built for recording, not programming. The recorder paradigm is intentional — it lowers the floor for non-coders — but it permanently caps the ceiling. Adobe has no incentive to replace it with something more powerful because it would confuse casual users and cannibalize their developer ecosystem (which sells ExtendScript training and plugins). The buyer here — a photo editor at an e-commerce agency or an in-house retouching team — rarely has a developer on call, and the IT/dev teams who could write scripts don't understand the retouching workflow well enough to write useful ones.

What users are actually asking for — 'more if/then options that could be coded in' and 'more commands to simplify the work of designers and save time on project development' — is a way to express conditional logic without writing code. That's not a plugin request. That's a missing layer of the tool entirely.

This is a business and not a feature because the need recurs every time a new project batch arrives, every time a client changes their image spec, every time a new product line requires a different treatment. An agency retouching team that manually handles what conditional automation would catch is leaving hours on the table weekly. The cost is concrete: a mid-size e-commerce retouching team processing 500 SKUs per week at 3 minutes of manual conditional judgment per image is burning 25 hours that shouldn't need a human.

What to build

Build a desktop app for macOS and Windows that lets Photoshop users construct conditional action sequences using a visual flowchart editor — where branches trigger based on image properties like dimensions, color mode, layer count, or filename pattern — and executes them against a batch via Photoshop's scripting bridge without requiring the user to write any code.

Where to start

Target Shopify agency retouching teams first — they have the most standardized image specs (white background, square crop, file size limits) which makes the conditional logic predictable enough to template, and they process high enough volume that ROI is obvious within the first week of use.

The hard part

Photoshop's scripting API is powerful but poorly documented and version-sensitive — a conditional action that works in PS 2023 may silently fail in PS 2024, meaning you're permanently on support duty for Adobe's update cycle, which you don't control.

How it makes money

Flat monthly subscription per seat, around $25-40/month, with a higher-tier team plan that includes shared action libraries across a retouching team.