After many hours of struggling & learning some PHP, this non-programmer has pretty much reached his limit.  You can download jcweather.us/animategr3.zip and have animated gif radar images for your web site should you wish (example to the left).  There's also a demo of cropping, resizing, overlaid text and graphics on a single file. jcweather.us/gr3/latestcrop.gif

This will work with, and convert png, jpg and gif files so it could be a good tool for other things as well.  A sequence of photos comes to mind.  Beware though that file sizes do get quite large.  For instance animating the 10 GR3 base reflectivity files at 425x425 resulted in a 1mb animation. 

Credit for getting me going on this goes to Tom from carterlake.org and Kevin from tnetweather.com as they tweeked my interest in this Forum.  Most of all, this would be impossible in PHP without the class built and made availailable by László Zsidi.

The code is heavily commented so no need for documentation.  You may need to make some directory or filename changes depending on your setup, but other than that just toss everything from the zip file into your gr3 directory and you'll be ready to go.  Suggestions and improvements will be greatly appreciated and hopefully I'll learn even more.


- Jim

Added:

test4php.php is now included, so upload it to your server then run it to see if you have PHP and GD.

If you are having GR3 append the radar identifier to filenames that it uploads, please add that to the input files because the example is set up differently.

I had my files all in a directory named /gr3/ directly below my root.  If you are set up differently, you'll need to work on the paths.

Your original files are left untouched so you can use them for other purposes.

Otherwise, I think most folks are able to get up and running fairly easily by carefully reading the comments in the code.