I have 3,000 images that are all 64x64px. They're actually all emojis.

I need to do 2 things:

1. Merge them in to a single looooooong image that's 64x192000px that will be used for a sprite; and

2. Place them there in a specific order... I have a text file with a list of the file names that are in the order that I want. The file names are based on the Unicode, so 1f600.png (the smiley) is the one that I would want first in the list, but alphabetically it's about 2000 spots down the list; 00a9.png is alphabetically first, which is a copyright symbol.

I probably won't keep them all as one long image; in the end, I'll probably have about 10 categories, so one sprite for each category. But that could still be several hundred of these emojis in one category.

Doing this manually would take forever! So I'm hoping you guys can suggest any type of program that can do it, or possibly any type of technique that could make the job easier.

(Dimitri pointed out the Unicode emoji list to me earlier, but about 1/3 of my traffic is Windows 7 so I can't really rely on that yet; I'll have to use images for at least the next few years)