An automated approach to visualize several xyz structures
You can use VMD to do this.
Note that the following is only tested on Linux with VMD version 1.9.2, i don't know how it works out on Windows or Apple OS.
The following is from a script that i used to render a trajectory. The first thing to do is to load your xyz file as trajectory. I.e. in a format so that vmd allows you to &quot;slide&quot; through the structures in its normal view. Then execute the script in the tlc console. The script iterates over the steps in incremenets of 2 and assumes that you have 2000 structures. The iteration variable is i. The actual command that changes the frames is the animate goto $i command. You would need to adjust that to fit your requirement. I used the tachyion renderer and saved the output figures in tga format. You will most likely have to adjust the path to the renderer binary which is the path /software/vmd-1.9.2/lib/vmd/tachyon_LINUXAMD64 in my case. VMD saves first a .dat file that contains the scene and then applies the renderer to this dat file. This is why i am setting two path variables, first fin for the .dat file and then fout for the actual tga file.
for {set i 0} {$i &lt; 2001} {incr i 2} {
animate goto $i
set fin [format "pic_%04d.dat" $i]
set fout [format "pic_%04d.tga" $i]
render Tachyon $fin "/software/vmd-1.9.2/lib/vmd/tachyon_LINUXAMD64" -aasamples 12 $fin -format TARGA -o $fout -res 1920 1080
}

The nice part about this is that you can implement other commands during your loop, like a zoom or a rotation. All you have to do, is find out what the tcl command in vmd is.