Trying to wrap my head around describing what I want to do because frankly, I'm not sure the ways I'm imagining it are very feasible.
The situation is, I have X number of image files that is a high number where manually editing them all would take an obnoxiously long time.
What I want to accomplish is applying an effect to them (the same effect with the same parameters for each one) and then simply save the file with that effect applied.
I tried to do some searching on how to call operations for one program from another, figuring maybe I could have a process that opens each file in a given folder in Paint.NET, applies the effect, then saves it and closes it. But I wasn't having much luck finding info on that and it seems like from what I could find, it's not very advisable from a security standpoint anyway (and this is really not a situation where it's worth creating security holes just to do what I want to accomplish - this is a side project for fun).
So then I was thinking, perhaps there's a way to write a plugin for Paint.NET that could do an operation like that and have it added to the registry, such that you can select multiple files in explorer, right-click, and choose the operation (I don't love this idea for the reason of how easily it could mess up files unintentionally by clicking the wrong thing in the dropdown on files that aren't related to the project, but I suppose it could be added and then removed when I'm finished). But anyway, from what I've read in the "What is and isn't possible when writing plugins" thread, this probably isn't doable with plugins, as it looks like they can't do things like opening or saving files.
So that's where I'm at with it at the moment. Hoping somebody with more experience can point me in a direction of what might be feasible to try, or kindly explain to me how crazy and not-very-doable this idea fundamentally is if that is the case. I do have some experience programming, so I'm not totally in the dark on the concept of doing operations on lots of files at once. It's just, doing the operations that Paint.NET does on image-based files, there's a lot of unknowns, ya know. Closest I could think of to an idea for doing it without any reliance on Paint.NET would be to somehow figure out how the particular effect I want to do works and then apply it on given files in a folder by editing their binary values or something, but that may be even more crazy than the other ideas, as I'm not sure you can even evaluate the image information properly to apply an effect without first loading it into a program that has interpreted its data as an image, like Paint.NET.
