Automation advice

[illgble]

I've got a lot of photos that all need to be scaled and positioned relative to a key photo. For each photo I go through the same process in Paint.NET: paste key as layer, resize canvas, change opacity of key layer, scale, position, delete key layer, resize canvas, save, close. Only the scale (which may require a couple undos) and position steps need my input. The rest of time I'm just hitting keystrokes and waiting for commands to complete.

So I'd like to remove as much of the repetitive stuff as possible and I'd like some advice. I initially figured I'd just write an add-in in c# to script the whole thing, but after a bit of digging, I'm not sure an add-in could pull this off. I've briefly looked at Windows scripting tools like AutoHotKey and thought maybe even PowerShell could help. I see a lot of different approaches, but none look particularly promising.

And advice appreciated.

kd

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Plugins can only access the active layer, so I doubt you're going to automate this with a plugin.

Scriptlab is the closest thing we have to batch processing: Scriptlab. It allows you to combine effects & adjustments, but it still limited to a single layer.

Have you tried importing the images as layers? That way you can use the same key on multiple images. Toggle the layer visibility to hide a layer when you're ready to move on to the next one.

Saving your images may require the layers to be flattened. Press undo to unflaten the layers once you've saved.

[illgble]

Importing as layers works pretty well. It cuts out all but the first and last canvas resize as well as all the pasting, so that's a big improvement. The weirdest thing I ran into in my test was that I lost my "Date Taken" file attribute when I saved out. Could that be because I flattened many layers each with a different "Date Taken"? I may need to delete all other layers instead of flattening, or copy the target layer to a new image before saving. Thanks for the advice, though. I think this will save me time.

kd

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Yes it sounds like the flattening does mess with the metadata. Only the visible layer(s) *should* have any bearing on the final image metadata.

This post is old, but there are a couple of tools that allow for editing of Exif/Metadata: http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/9562-edit-exif/page__view__findpost__p__156878