Work in progress, and a question

[MarcoP]

Many thanks for the various suggestions about animation, and the pro-actively proposed solutions (!) in particular from doranchak.

I'm afraid that GIF files are not an option, with their 256-entry colour table.

Also, what I would like to achieve would be:
- pause on one image
- gradual transition to next
- pause on next image
(etc)

What I would do, is generating "paused" and fading frames at will using imagemagick:

Code:

for rate in 25 50 75; do composite  -blend $rate b.jpg a.jpg a'_'$rate'.jpg'; done

Then animate the result with ffmpeg. I guess you will only need a small framerate (12 at most).
Others will certainly suggest something smarter