Smarter 'import sprite sheet' options

As someone who loves making gifs from spritesheets, I use the Import Sprite Sheet function quite a bit, but it’s a little cumbersome as is. It requires sprites to be spaced perfectly apart (with padding options I do quite appreciate), but most sprite sheets that are casually made (like what I find on spriter’s resource) are not arranged like that, understandably so. I find it needlessly tedious to rearrange sprites to be perfectly spaced, so I’d like to propose two ideas for importing sprites:

  1. Sprite ‘smart detection’. Much like the Select Content feature, a function could be made to detect active, non-transparent pixels and then separate them between fully transparent columns/rows. Then, the imported animation’s canvas size will be the highest X and Y values detected among those so it will all fit.

  2. Importing via marquee selections. A little slower and a little messier than the first idea, but if you could simply draw a rectangle for each frame you wanted, then hit import, you could easily grab what you need from a sprite sheet. Again the following canvas size would match the highest X and Y values of those selections.

Let me know if this makes sense or if anyone has made something similar because I’d love to know! I will try my hand at coding and see if I can make an extension like this, but no promises.