How to display multiple images in date sequence by file date?

Joseph Sinclair plug-discussion at stcaz.net
Wed Jun 24 17:24:24 MST 2015


To do something like that you're probably going to need to use image magick or a similar tool.

It sounds like you want to do a contact sheet or filmstrip rather than a slideshow.

The Image Magick "montage" command is made for this purpose, it's documented here: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/montage.php
You'd replace the for loop with something like this:

montage $(ls -1t) -tile x1 ../filmstrip.png

(note, I use the number 1, not the letter l in the option to ls, I mistyped last time).

That would create a single output image (probably large) with all the input images lined up.  You could follow that with a display command and, optionally, delete the filmstrip if you don't want to keep it.
It could take a very long time to generate and display that filmstrip at full size, so you might want to resize the images at the same time:

montage $(ls -1t) -tile x1 -size 512x512 ../filmstrip.png

There are a ton of other options (including -coalesce if you really just want an animation of the images), so it's worth reading the documentation.


On 06/24/2015 03:17 PM, joe at actionline.com wrote:
> Todd suggested:
>> drop the l in the -lt ... or do it a-like-so:
>> for filename in `ls -lt | awk '{print $NF-2 $NF-1 $NF}'`; do (etc)
> 
> Thanks Todd. I tried your suggestion and it gave the same
> error as Joseph's script. By experimenting, I discovered
> that if I removed the quotation marks around "$filename"
> it worked somewhat.
> 
> However, both scripts put all of the images on top of one
> another.
> 
> So, how can I modify these scripts so the images will
> *not* all be on top of one another but will be separated
> out in some way, perhaps one after another on a line?
> 
> 
> ====================
> Joe originally asked:
> I have a directory/folder that contains several
> dozen image files, all with different file dates.
> 
> How can I create a script that would display the images
> that those files represent (not just list the files)
> in date sequence from newest to oldest?
> 
> ---------------
> Joseph Sinclair first replied (in part):
> for filename in "$(ls -lt)" ; do display-image "$filename" ; done
> replace display-image with your preferred image display tool.
> 
> ---------------
> Joe replied to Joseph: That  script is exactly what I wanted,
> but sadly, it didn't work for me.  What did I do wrong?
> When I put 7 small images in a folder to try that script,
> I got the result shown here:
> - - http://www.upquick.com/temp/decode.error.jpg
> 
> 
> 
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