the align buttons dont really seem to do anything with my layers, annoying as there is an option "distribute layers to right edges" which sounds like it mite put everything side by side for me. They do align to the vertical centre nicely thought which is handy for sorting them out so thank you very much for the tip!

in the end i made a sprite creator, its not polished yet put it can take a directory of images and put them side by side, or take one image and make a sprite sheet of all rotations 360 degrees, it cant fully handle alpha yet but its getting there, if anyone is interested in it post here and ill send you it!