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.

This idea is exactly what I’m looking for, and my use case is also importing spritesheets found in Spriter’s Resource. It would be super useful what you describe in option number 1.
I might try and learn some Lua to do something like this…