Retrobatch (Pro): Still worth it with Shortcuts and Finder quick actions?

Software
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Hello fellow power users,

I saw that Acorn 7 and Retrobatch (Pro) from Flying Meat software are on sale since June already as reported by @beck.

Acorn was updated recently and gained some automation features. It integrates with Shortcuts on a basic level now, which is nice.
I always had an eye on Retrobatch (Pro) to automate some image processing tasks that were tedious to do via the command line using imageoptim or using Automator.

At some point I bought PhotoBulk when it was discounted to $1.99, but the app doesn’t seem to be maintained well anymore. Some limitations also annoyed me from the start, like it always creating a subfolder for the output.
Since Finder quick actions got overhauled a few macOS versions ago, I’ve built some Automator actions to convert HEIC to JPG or scale images by percentages for quick access. Also, Apple’s Mail app offers image resizing for attachments now (?) “live” in the new mail composer window. And lets not forget that Shortcuts seems to be getting more image manipulation actions with every OS update.

I skipped through this tutorial’s examples: Retrobatch - Magic Image Processing on Your Mac (FULL TUTORIAL) - YouTube
To me it looks as if you would often have to use the UI of Retrobatch or can I also use it headless as in triggered by a Shortcut, quick actions, or from Alfred/Keyboard Maestro/BTT/… ?

No doubt, Retrobatch surely is more powerful and you can create complex workflows with multiple outputs and it also includes renaming functions without the need to run Better Rename or alike. The PSD-layered Screenshot and the ML-classification features are interesting, but I never really needed it.

Are there additional use cases that I am missing that make it still worth it for you with Shortcuts and Finder quick actions covering most basic needs?

I guess I’m just looking for inspiration to justify the purchase. :upside_down_face:
Thanks a bunch!

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I bought Retrobatch Pro a long time ago and find I don’t use it that much, but usually it’s because it doesn’t quite do what I need. Like recently I wanted some contact sheets, but it insists on picking the number of rows, where I’d rather it figure that out to fit an approximate aspect ratio (so I can QuickLook the contact sheet most effectively to quickly find images).

When it does have what you need, it is way, way simpler than trying to figure out the incantations for Image Magick, which is what I had to resort to for my contact sheets. It has a lot more capability than something like Squash, but then a lot of the time, Squash has all I need.

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