[Chimera-users] Saving images of all scenes in session?

[Oliver Clarke]

Hi all,

Apologies for yet another post and thank you for your patience! :-)

Feature suggestion (or maybe this exists already?): I would like a way to iterate over all scenes in a session and save an image at each scene, with the same display settings (e.g keep background or make transparent, image format, wall-eye/cross-eye stereo, etc).

This would be really very helpful when making, remaking and updating figures. Most of the time, I will have a session, say “Fig1.py”, within which I will have a bunch of scenes corresponding to each panel. It would be really advantageous to be able to take images of each scene all at once, saving each as (for example) Fig1_scene_name.jpg, Fig1_scene_name2.jpg etc. This could work in the same way as saving series of maps or models does now - just have a checkbox in the Save Image dialog for “save images for all scenes in session”, or something similar.

It can take quite a while to save each image when on a slow computer, or when using graphics intensive settings such as silhouettes and shadows, so being able to save matched sets of images (e.g. low and hi-res versions, stereo versions, etc) with a couple of clicks would save a lot of time, particularly for example if you realize that the versions you saved the first time were all too low res and you want to go back and save a higher res version of every panel.

I realize you guys might not have time to implement this for Chimera 1, as development of Chimera 2 is top priority, so maybe I can write a script to do this in the meantime? Is there any way to return a list of scene names using one of the built in python functions? I guess something in Animate.Scenes ought to do this, but not being much of a python programmer I can’t quite figure it out - any tips much appreciated.

Cheers,
Oli.