I’m using GIMP for animations and I’m having some problems with actions that need to be repeated many times. This is an example on my YouTube channel: Ladybug Flight Pattern 1 - YouTube
For this 18 sec. video (including the title screen) I took the original image (a scanned drawing) and rotated it in increments of 22.5° from 0° to 337.5° and also reflected each of these images horizontally . Then I cropped each resulting image so that there was a small border around it and exported it as an EPS file for inclusion in a TeX file by means of the \epsffile macro from the dvips package.
I’ve also rotated the image using increments of other values and reflected the resulting images and started making versions with different coloring. Obviously, this creates a lot of images, which all have to be redone when corrections or changes are needed.
I have been able to streamline the process somewhat by setting keyboard shortcuts but the real problem is menus where I have to move the mouse and click on a field (e.g., “Export”) in order to finish a given step.
I’ve started reading up on the Scheme and Python interfaces, but it’s a lot of material. I would appreciate it very much if someone had a suggestion for a quick way of solving this particular problem.
However, if you look around or ask the right questions, there are already plenty of scripts.
There are script to rotate a layer by increments (and these create additional layers)
There are scripts to export all the layers in the image to individual files
If your images are small and you want to make some global color change on them, you can join them into a big image/layer (sprite sheet), apply the change to the sprite sheet, and then split the sprite sheet back to individual images.
So with a few scripts and some workflow adaptation/planning , your afternoon project takes a few minutes.
Also, it is usually best to keep all these as layers in the same Gimp image, this avoid loading & saving too many times. This also lets you apply many transform to all layers at the same time.
Thank you very much for your answer. I’ve taken a look at the Source Forge project and your GIMP Tools website and will start looking at the scripts this afternoon.