Hello, I think image sequence handling is basic and extremely limited, it's been like this for a couple decades and I think it's about time it gets updated.
The following suggestions are for all sorts of image/file sequences in Maya (textures, image planes, alembic files, standins, etc...)
-We need an easy and quick way to loop an image sequence (loop, reverse, ping pong)
-We need a way to hold the first or last frames of a sequence outside its original range
-We need an easy way to retime an image sequence
-We need a better way to offset an image sequence
-It would be great to have advanced options where we can set in and out points, and loop only sections of a sequence
As it is, if we need to loop a sequence, we break the time expression connection, create a couple keys and an animation curve and set its post and pre infinity to cycle (in many other programs you just click "loop").
On top of this, if we want to offset that loop, what it does is add or subtract the offset value to the image number. So, if we have an image sequence that goes from frame 1-50 and then offset it by 10 frames, at some point it's going to fail because it's looking for frames 51-60. We need loop functions and more clever offsetting (this was a huge problem for us when doing crowd cycles with standins).
Cheers
