The basic idea is that if you do several common remaing operations that have different options selected (including paths), then it can be a pain to manually make all the changes each time you want to rename that set of files.

If you have a few different folders for pictures taken off your digital camera, and you like the photos to be moved from the camera location to a specific picture location, then you could have multiple profiles set up for that.

(multiple profiles are only supported in the Deluxe edition)

Example

Profile 1 (which for this sample is called 'Julie Baby Pictures'), has the option set to move the files to the c:\Users\chris.000\Documents\julie folder once the rename has completed, and we have set the Filename field to be a Custom Filename in the Filename area, we have also turned on the Separator and specified a Unique Parameter to increment starting at 1, and the source folder set to j:\Premiere\Adobe Premiere Elements Auto-Save\. So, if we load this profile, all of these setting will be set automatically.

Profile 2 might be for family vacation pictures, so for that I would change the source folder to j:\pictures\unsorted and the option set to move (after rename) to j:\pictures\family pictures\ and I've set the Filename box to be a Custom Filename with Vacation as the new filename. When I preview this set, I can see that the pictures will be renamed Vacation-0001.jpg, Vacation-0002.jpg, etc... and they will be automatically moved to the new folder.

Profile 3 might be set up to change the Date Modified Date on files in a certain folder

You could also have profiles set up for work, if you did ebay auctions, you could have different profiles with folders set up to automatically move the pictures from your camera to the ebay pictures directory.

This is only a small sample of what profiles could be used for, feel free to play around with them.