Reading Images from one folder into one array

Hi Guys,

I am still new to node-red so I try to figure out some basic stuff.
This time I stumbled over something within the node-red-contrib-animate-gif node.
The Info tab for the Input Data says:
payloadarray
array of image buffers to use as GIF frames.

I have all files stored in one single folder, which is updated from time to time by a snapshot from a web-cam. So I am not 100% sure how I may utilize this gif-node in an practicable way for me.
One thing I thought about: I have to extract all images files via js in a function block and put everything together into a image buffer array.
But maybe there is again some build-in function I just do not know yet, which would save me enourmous time in solving that problem, since I am also new to scipting in js.

Thanks already in advance,
cheers Christian

Hi Christian,

First of all: I hope you are aware that storing webcam images in an array will consume much RAM memory. Not sure whether you are talking about large images or a lot of images?

Indeed you could do all of that in a function node. I had a quick look and I don't think there is currently a node available that can read the content of all files of a folder into an array.

The closest thing I found is the File-Lister node, which is part of the node-red-contrib-fs from @TotallyInformation. I'm not sure whether it might be a good idea to ask him to add an extra checkbox to this node:

Which would trigger a small code snippet:

Of course, this way the default encoding will be used all of the time ...

Bart

Yes, file lister will give you the files to work with, you can then send each to a file-in node then to a variable.

However, as you say, that's potentially a LOT of memory. It would be far better to use a command line tool to directly create the gif because that will most likely be written in C++ or go (maybe rust) and so be very memory efficient. JavaScript isn't a good language for that.

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