The Variant Problem
You design a promotional card with four logo variants, three text layouts (Group A, Group B, Group C), and fifteen product images. That's 4 × 3 × 15 = 180 unique exports. Manually toggling layer visibility for every combination is tedious, error-prone, and doesn't scale.
This is the cross-product problem. Every time you add a new option to any group, the total number of combinations multiplies. With four groups of five options each, you're looking at 625 unique exports. No one wants to toggle layers 625 times.
How Combinations Within Group Works
Xlaypand's Iteration Mode includes a Combinations Within Group option. You select the parent groups in the Layers panel — each group's children get selected automatically, and you deselect the children so only the groups themselves remain checked. In the Iteration panel, each group shows a card with the "Combinations within Group" dropdown and a description of how many direct child layers it will cycle through. The plugin calculates the full cross-product and generates every possible combination automatically — visibility toggling, export naming, and batch execution handled end to end. It also works alongside CSV data binding, so a 50-row CSV with 6 layer variants produces 300 exports in a single run.
Real-World Use Cases
Apparel Catalog
A fashion brand launches a new collection with 12 garments. Each garment is available in 4 colors. The marketing team needs hero shots for the website in both light and dark background variants.
Template setup: Group "Garment" (12 Smart Objects), Group "Color Overlay" (4 color layers), Group "Background" (Light, Dark). Total: 12 × 4 × 2 = 96 exports. The entire catalog is generated in a single batch run — no manual toggling, no missed variants, no duplicates.
Product Configurator Assets
A furniture company offers a chair in 5 fabrics, 3 wood finishes, and 2 leg styles. Their web configurator needs an image for every possible combination: 5 × 3 × 2 = 30 images. A photographer would need hours to shoot each one. With a 3D render template and Combinations Within Group, all 30 assets are generated from a single PSD in minutes.
Performance
Combinations scale multiplicatively — three groups with 5 layers each produce 125 iterations per CSV row. Xlaypand processes each combination efficiently with minimal per-iteration overhead, but plan your groups and layer counts to keep total export counts manageable for your project timeline. Four suffix modes (Layer Name, Layer+#, Sequence, Group Index) give you flexible control over how exports are named.