Utility applications

Handy applications developed by others

You may find some of these 3rd party utility applications helpful for doing Timelapse-related tasks.

ReNamer is a powerful and flexible file renaming tool. You can create rules that determine how your files should be renamed. It includes previews of name changes and error checking.

Renaming is usually done to name images into something that is meaningful to you or your agency. For example, some agencies want file names to include its date/time stamp, or to be unique across all files (e.g., cameraName_deploymentID_timestamp.jpg ). Be careful about name length, as Windows often imposes a length limit of 260 characters for the entire path to your file (yes, this is really dumb).

Timelapse itself doesn’t really care what you call your files: using default names are fine. If you do decide to rename your files, you should rename your image files before loading them into Timelapse.

DB Browser allow you to open, view, query and even edit the contents of SQLite database files and its tables. When an SQLite database file is opened, you will see its data schema, its various data tables and their contents, be able to enter an SQL query, etc. (SQLiteStudio is a similar application; which you choose is up to you).

The Timelapse .tdb and .ddb files are both SQLite database files (see Timelapse Database Guide). After installing one of the applications above, right click on the desired timelapse file, select ‘Open with…‘ and navigate to the installed application.

Database browsers are handy if you are somewhat database savvy. You may want to explore the actual Timelapse database structure and data contents, or run queries not normally available in Timelapse. I usually use them for debugging those rare cases where things go wrong. Be careful about changing anything in the database unless you really know what you are doing! Because Timelapse expects a certain database structure and columns containing data conforming to particular data types, uninformed changes can corrupt your database.

Windows-based editors are poor at handing really large text files. The free EditPad Lite text editor works really well for this purpose. I find EditPad Lite handy for inspecting and/or editing image recognition (.json) files, which can be huge. However, I suspect this is something most of you will not have to do.

Repair utilities

I developed these programs to help various individuals solve a particular problem. Its unlikely that you will need any of them. But just in case, here they are. If you are unsure about what to do or if your situations is slightly different, contact me.

This utility corrects dates on images extracted from video files. For example, one user used a reconyx camera to record videos, and then used a 3rd party software system to extract the frames from those videos as JPG images to be read into Timelapse. The problem is that image extraction sets the date to the time of extraction, rather than preserve the date as recorded in the video. This utility lets you correct that.

As input, it expects a folder where the extracted image names are the .avi video file name plus numbered suffixes, e.g., Recn003.avi, Recn003-01.jpg, Recn003-02.jpg, …. . You canalso indicate a time interval between the extracted images, e.g., .5 seconds if the original software extracted frame for each half second of video. It takes the date modified from the source video (avi) file, and uses the sort order of image names to set and increment the date + interval accordingly.

This application resets Timelapse’s saved settings on your computer back to their default values. It works by removing all Timelapse-related settings from the Windows registry.

As you use Timelapse, it records various values in the Windows registry on your computer. This includes the last displayed position of yourTimelapse windows, any preferences and settings you modify, your recently opened Timelapse files, which dialog boxes to show (or hide), and others. When you open Timelapse, it reads and applies these values to your Timelapse session.

On rare occasions, you may want to restore these settings back to their defaults. Reasons for doing so include: a desire to go back to the Timelapse defaults; or to fix a problem or crash that you suspect may have occurred due to a default setting.

This utility program will let you update a CSV comma-separated values (spreadsheet) file to help make it compatible with what Timelapse expects when importing a CSV file. You can only use it to alter column header names, to trim file name paths, and to split a file path to the expected File and RelativePath values. See the Timelapse Reference Guide, Section 11 The Update CSV File Utility for details on how to use it and what it does.

Some Browning trail cameras, when set in timelapse mode to capture an image every time interval, store a sequence of captured images as a single TLS file rather than as individual jpg files.

Click the button above to go to the Timelapse FAQ page on this topic. It contains and explanation, instructions and scripts on how to extract those images as jpg files, and how to correct its date/time metadata.

A user reported a case where some of their images taken from a Reconyx camera were appearing on the screen ‘squashed’, i.e., compressed into a few color rows at the top. The images – even though they appeared correctly in a standard image viewer – turned out to be partially corrupted. Without going into technical details, the Reconyx camera stopped recording the horizontal image resolution, which Timelapse uses. The RepairImages utility fixes those images.

First, back up your images. Then run RepairImages on your folder. It will check all images there. For those that are damaged, a new repaired copy is created and placed in a sub-folder called “RepairedImages”. You can then copy (or move) those images back into your main folder, thus replacing the damaged images. Then remove the RepairedImages folder, as you don’t want Timelapse to read those in again. But, just in case, remember the first thing I mentioned above: make a backup of that folder first in case things go wrong!
Note: The repair facility may not copy over all the metadata fields from your image, particularly if they are non-standard. Do a test to see if the metadata of interest to you is still there (try both metadata extraction tools in Timelapse). If the metadata is missing, then have Timelapse load your original images, then import the metadata you need, and then do the above repair.