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Everybody taking pictures of coins online or for catalogs knows how long it takes to splice, color correct, crop, make thumbnails, rename, etc. pictures of coins. When we first started selling coins online we would list an average of 20 to 40 coins a week and eventually got up to at least 100 coins a week after a year or so. During that time, we experimented with various things to both save our time and to take better quality pictures. The problem was, no matter what tricks we came up with, it would still take a whole day because in the end, we're still sitting in front of the computer deciding how to select the coin and have both pictures splice together exactly.
We designed a digital lighting setup to fix the camera above the coin but to be quickly adjustable just incase it needs to be. The lighting is a special daylight lamp used in digital video movies so the coin's colors matches real life as close as possible. The light shines both below and above the coin so the coin appears to be suspended in mid-air, which is the most desirable look. It also helps when removing the background of the coin because there will be no shadow cast.
We then hired a programmer that specializes in computer graphics to design a program to open a list of files and then click a button and have it do all the work. The first version got the basic idea working but the coins looked a little blurry and the colors didn't look as good as when we would manually splice them by hand. So after tweaking with it a couple of days, those issues were resolved. Over the course of a few weeks we tested the program against the hundreds of coins we would list on eBay. 99% of the coins came out perfectly but the 1% would show too much of the background because of small fibers or specs off to the sides of the picture. We were happy with it because it's easy to blow the debris out of the way but the programmer is a perfectionist and told us to send him any problem pictures and he would tweak with the program to fix it. As of today, the program works 100% of the time even against any poorly taken pictures we've thrown at it.
If you take a very conservative estimate and say it takes 3 hours to manually do the above work for 100 coins, that 3 hours translates to less than 10 minutes with our coin software. You can still use the computer during that time with no hiccups, just minimize the window and have it run in the background. We're using a 2ghz computer but our pictures are huge 1600x1200 jpegs that are 1 meg each (i.e. the directory has over 200 megs of images in it) so your times may differ slightly.
Our images speak for themselves; you can compare our coins on eBay with all the other people selling ancient coins on eBay. Not only compare the quality of ours compared to theirs but note that we don't do anything special to make our pictures look so good. All we do is just place the coin on the glass, make sure it's rotated correctly in the view, take the picture, flip the coin over, take the picture again, and repeat that over a hundred times then stick the memory card in the computer and run the program on it. This isn't going to solve all your problems selling bulk coins online or arranging pictures for a catalog but it's a huge help.