Easiest way to join a lot of image tiles
Posted: 2012-01-22T18:21:12-07:00
I need to do something conceptually very simple but extremely tedious to do by hand. I need to join together a large number of 256 pixel square JPG image "tiles" into a single large rectangular image. There's nothing complicated about the joining. The images are on a square grid. They need to be joined edge-to-edge, not overlapping but with no gap between them.
I'm sure ImageMagick can do this, but I have spent a couple of hours reading the documentation, and am overwhelmed by the facilities available, and can't pick out just the few commands that I need. Also, I think I will probably need to use one of the language APIs to do what I want. I need to be able to loop over the tiles in a column, generating the correct filename for each tile and joining them together, and outside this I need to be able to loop over the columns, running the inner loop and then joining the columns together. This sounds quite difficult in a batch file. My instinct suggested try PHP since I'm reasonably competent in PHP, but the Imagick module doesn't seem to have a Windows binary but needs building from source. The "quick and simple" procedure for doing this seemed to consist of about 15 pages of detailed instructions for doing things I have never done before. I can imagine it will take me days if not weeks just to master the building of Imagick. I just don't have the time for this.
Can someone suggest a simpler way for me to achieve what I need?
Many thanks - Rowan
I'm sure ImageMagick can do this, but I have spent a couple of hours reading the documentation, and am overwhelmed by the facilities available, and can't pick out just the few commands that I need. Also, I think I will probably need to use one of the language APIs to do what I want. I need to be able to loop over the tiles in a column, generating the correct filename for each tile and joining them together, and outside this I need to be able to loop over the columns, running the inner loop and then joining the columns together. This sounds quite difficult in a batch file. My instinct suggested try PHP since I'm reasonably competent in PHP, but the Imagick module doesn't seem to have a Windows binary but needs building from source. The "quick and simple" procedure for doing this seemed to consist of about 15 pages of detailed instructions for doing things I have never done before. I can imagine it will take me days if not weeks just to master the building of Imagick. I just don't have the time for this.
Can someone suggest a simpler way for me to achieve what I need?
Many thanks - Rowan