• Import a directory of image files into OBS, creating a new source and scene for each image.
• Each new scene is based on an existing scene, which can be used as a template.

For our church live-stream productions, we have many image slides to set up each week. Each one uses the same audio input and overlays the same camera shot in the corner of each slide.

I set up the images to be imported in a directory, and create a template scene that includes the audio and camera sources. Then I run this script to create all the new scenes.

A directory of images like this:

Will look like this in OBS after the script finishes:

The script imports images in lexographical order, and expects the file names to be in a format like 01 - Scene Name.jpg.

Examples:

• 01 - Scene A.jpg: The 01 is discarded. Used only to order the files. This image would create a source called Image - Scene A and place it in a new scene named Scene A.
• 02 - Art Project.jpg: This image would create a source called Image - Art Project and place it in a new scene named Art Project.

• Script was developed on OSX. I haven't tested it on Windows. (If you do use this script on Windows, please let me know.)
• Images are not resized or fit to the canvas. They will likely need to be resized/tweaked manually after import.
• Every file in your selected directory should be an image. The script doesn't attempt to filter out non-image files, and I haven't tested how OBS responds to non-image files which are run through this process.

Leaving these notes here because the OBS documentation was unclear.

• As of April 2020, brew install python installs python 3.7.7. This is fine for OBS 25 on Mac. I saw many references saying OBS required python <= 3.6, but this is no longer the case on Mac. (OBS on Windows still requires python 3.6.)
• In OBS, go to the Tools -> Scripts menu and select the 'Python Settings' tab.
• The Python Install Path should be /usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.7/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7 Make sure that directory actually exists. You might need to tweak the path to match the python version you've installed.

If it helps to see how mine looks, here's what I have:

$ ls -lh /usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.7/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7
total 4616
lrwxr-xr-x   1 alex  staff    18B Apr 19 15:49 Headers -> include/python3.7m
-rwxr-xr-x   1 alex  staff   2.3M Apr 19 15:50 Python
drwxr-xr-x   4 alex  staff   128B Apr 19 15:50 Resources
drwxr-xr-x  16 alex  staff   512B Apr 19 15:50 bin
drwxr-xr-x   3 alex  staff    96B Apr 19 15:49 include
drwxr-xr-x   6 alex  staff   192B Apr 19 15:49 lib
drwxr-xr-x   3 alex  staff    96B Apr 19 15:50 share

The scene configuration data in ~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/basic/scenes (on OSX) is handy for seeing how data is supposed to be structured. Several of the API calls used in this script were reverse-engineered by reading that data.