We take a lot of photos. At the end of the year I like to drop them all into a movie stop-action style. So far the best way that I’ve found to do this is with iStopMotion but it’s still really frustrating.

For starters, and I find this mystifying, you have to spec the frame rate when you create the movie file. I suspect that the target audience just works at a particular frame rate all the time, and finds this normal. It makes me crazy. Why can’t you load up images as a sequence and then output them at whatever frame-rate you want? Fundamentally any movie is just a stack of still images.

The other drag is that you have to import images at the file level. You can’t just tell iStopMotion to walk through a series of nested folders. Quicktime Pro will let you open an image sequence which almost gets me there. But the images already have to be in the same folder and they need to be named foo_000.jpg, foo_001.jpg, and so on. This means hand editing the file names of 500-2500 images. No thank you! At least iStopMotion doesn’t care what the files are called.

This is exactly the sort of highly repetitive work that computers are supposed to be good at doing. Why can’t I find a better solution?