I need a solution to create one big image with sprites from ~100 single images periodically without intervention because the number of images and the images itself are changing over time. To create the sprites with e.g. http://css-sprit.es/ or any other toolu with a GUI would not be feasible.
Each image has a different width and height. Images formats are png, gif, jpg. My approach would be write a custom java program to concatenate the images vertically into one big image and create a json file to provide the coordinates for later processing. A google search returned me this java awt based tutorial: https://sites.google.com/site/javagamescorner/home/creating-sprites
Is there another way you would recommend to create sprites? There are a lot of (too?) complex tools and libraries and maybe there is an easier solution.
This Stackoverflow thread mentions a lot of java libraries: open source image processing lib in java