gonna revive this almost a year later because i also would very much like to limit the changes to specific cultures. dont get me wrong, the mod is great work, im just generally satisfied with most of the base game portraits as is as of holy fury

what im looking to do is change only the norse, celtic, russian, nahuatl and saxon portaits. i want to eliminate the older, less impressive portrait packs, but also i really love the changes to saxon/ango-saxon hairstyles and want to keep that around. unfortunately i have a rare and incurable disease called stupidbitchitis which makes it difficult for me to use a computer so im really struggling with making it work

what would i have to delete from the blg archive and what would i have to keep to avoid weird effects? are there text files that need editing? please explain in exhaustive detail i am just so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid

You can pick out a selection of the portraits. Get the relevant parts like gfx/characters/celtic_*, interface/portraits_celtic.gfx, interface/portraits/portraits_celtic.gfx and so on for different sets.
From the portrait files delete the child, son and daughter layers and replace the background layer with the default GFX_character_background.
For the Saxons get the English portraits as well since they are combined in the default setup.

im gonna keep it real with you. even with these instructions i messed up a bunch and had to trial and error my way into success and also in the end i straight up could not get the saxon portraits to work properly, but thats got a whole lot more to do with me being an industrial grade dumbass than with the intructions given. in the end i managed to accomplish the main task of getting rid of the older portraits and im content with that

thanks a bunch dude, youre the greatest