I made an Automator workflow that essentially runs a shell script to optimize images. I intend to use it as a Finder extension, by selecting images and running the workflow as a “quick action”.

With a small number of high resolution images (tested with about 10), the workflow runs perfectly well in both Automator.app and in the Finder.

With about ~1000 high-resolution images, it still works (slowly) via Automator.app, but nothing happens when attempting to run the workflow via the Finder. No image at all is being processed (when using Automator.app, I see them being saved to the destination folder one after the other), and it doesn’t seem that the shell script itself is crashing (my script should log errors).

I have a feeling that this is a memory issue. Are there known limitations of Finder extensions? Is there a way to debug this further?