How to tell Godot to import a .png file as atlas texture?

Question

I am working with a couple thousand png sprites, how can I tell Godot to not import them as individual image textures automatically once I copied them in the project?

Usually I have to:

1> Copy the folder with the thousand sprites,
2> Wait a couple of awful minutes as godot automatically import them as individual textures,
3> Select all the image textures in the inspector filesystem,
4> Re-import as atlas-texture.

Because it takes around 5-10 minutes, and the project when finished will have a couple hundred thousand sprites, imagine having to wait 1-2 hours to have to reimport them later, I'll probabily not be able to finish the project...

I cannot disable the auto-importer temporarily or tell Godot to straight create atlas-texture from those sprites.

Comments

Upon interating on a solution, I found two approaches:

1 : Create a custom importer for a custom format, so we would rename the .pngs to .XYZ extension, godot will not import them, then on Godot we create a import plugin to read that as what we wanted specifically, a atlas texture from the image files in the folder.

2 : Create another empty project just to handle this, so we can let it importing in the background while working on the main project, once it finishes, we set in the empty project to import all the thousand pngs to atlas texture, then after that, move those resources to the main godot project, this way it imports as we wanted, and it only takes some seconds to import the atlas and read the files, because .import files are present telling it is part of a atlas texture, godot will not import the pngs as individual textures, which is the expected behavior.

Option 2 is now my workaround for this specific issue, I guess the main problem is the editor freezes everytime is importing something.

Answer 1

Have you tried bundling the images together? Just having tilesheets of combined sprites can really speed up the process as well to save space