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Any quick way to reduce number of images in time-lapse sequence quickly?

Assume I have 1,000 images that I want to reduce to 250.


I can put them in the timeline and speed it up 4 times but is there another quick way (in or out of FCPX) to weed out the 750 unnecessary ones?

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 11.5

Posted on May 20, 2022 8:23 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 20, 2022 10:20 AM

You can do this in the terminal. It's quick but the command below is probably not the most efficient way and won't work if the filenames have any spaces in them. You can remove or replace spaces in the Finder with the Rename... command.


Let's say your 1,000 images named image0001.jpg...image1000.jpg are in a folder named allPics/. Make another folder next to it called something like selectedPics/.


Open Terminal.app. Type cd<space> and then drag the allPics folder into the Terminal window and hit return. (Type a space, don't actually type '<space>').


Then copy and paste this command and press return :

cp $(ls | awk '{nr++; if (nr % 4 == 0) print $0}') ../selectedPics


This will copy every 4th file from allPics into selectedPics.

6 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 20, 2022 10:20 AM in response to Ian R. Brown

You can do this in the terminal. It's quick but the command below is probably not the most efficient way and won't work if the filenames have any spaces in them. You can remove or replace spaces in the Finder with the Rename... command.


Let's say your 1,000 images named image0001.jpg...image1000.jpg are in a folder named allPics/. Make another folder next to it called something like selectedPics/.


Open Terminal.app. Type cd<space> and then drag the allPics folder into the Terminal window and hit return. (Type a space, don't actually type '<space>').


Then copy and paste this command and press return :

cp $(ls | awk '{nr++; if (nr % 4 == 0) print $0}') ../selectedPics


This will copy every 4th file from allPics into selectedPics.

Any quick way to reduce number of images in time-lapse sequence quickly?

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