For manual release you could use the "Get Comment" checkbox in Lifecycle transitions. This gives user a prompt to enter a history entry. As far as I remember this doesn´t work for promotion triggered by Innovator itself. But as you want to track manual promotions it would be worth a try.
Regarding Batchloader this is a use case I would also be interested in. It´s on a very basic way possible track whenever somebody logs in with an non-browser based application like BatchLoader. So you might create an server Method that checks if users comes from an external tool and write History entries by yourself.
But that’s just a small brainstorming without any testing! There might be better options available already!
