Hi Gimp developers,

if you are considering to include support for MPO files in Gimp, you can freely use the code I have developed recently. It is available here http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpoutils/

MPO stands for Multiple Picture Object. It is basically JPEG file, which utilizes App2 EXIF blocks to include more than one image into the single file. Although it can store virtually any number of pictures, the main usage at the moment is for storing stereo images, captured by Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D camera, Nintendo 3DS or some model of HTC phone. The format also seems to be widely supported by recent models of 3D TVs.

Although I personally don't need the support by Gimp, since it is quite easy to split the images, load them as layers into Gimp, make required changes, adjustments, etc., save them as new images and join them back using my utility, I can see that there were some requests of this kind already:
http://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-developer/14313-reading-and-saving-of-3d-mpo-files-in-gimp

There exists a plugin also mentioned in that thread, which can load an MPO image into Gimp. However, I don't recommend to use this one, since it does not analyze the App headers at all and leaves the App2 blocks in the decomposed JPEG image. This might confuse application and devices which understand MPO.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks, Pavel

Hi Sven,

OK, it looks like it is quite easy to implement load and save handlers. Does it mean that the "mpo" extension will appear in the list of supported formats in Export/Import commands?

If yes, I can write such a plug-in and test it on Linux, but I will definitively not compile it for Windows :-)

Or maybe I'll try to post a note to Kumar first, if he wants to make changes in his plug-in.

Thanks, Pavel