10 years time lapse

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I’ve always enjoyed watching time lapse videos of people, so I decided to create my own. So far I’m at 10 years, from May 18th 2011 to 2021. It’s a bit boring because I haven’t changed that much, which is a good thing actually.

10 years time lapse

Making of

For the longest time, I could rely on an app named Everyday. At least twice it stopped working because the developer wasn’t keeping up with API and OS changes. Since I always made it save a copy of the picture on the iPhone camera roll, I haven’t lost any data. For a while I didn’t use any app, just the phone’s selfie camera, which made it hard to keep the pictures aligned. The Everyday app had nice alignment guides for that. Then I moved to the Dayli app, which I’m still using now. The problem with switch apps, and with those apps in particular, is that importing existing pictures is either a massive pain in the ass or does not work at all.

Both apps would be able to create the video based on the pictures, but I failed to import the 1424 pictures. Thankfully, QuickTime allows to create a time lapse! The only downside is that you cannot go slower than 24 images per second. That’s why the 1424 pictures over 10 years got squeezed into 1 minute.

Create a time lapse with QuickTime
Create a time lapse with QuickTime

The data

I would have loved to display a map with either a heatmap or animated locations of where the pictures were taken, but the GPS data got lost at some point. It would have been nice, because I’ve visited a lot of places in the last 10 years.

The device used to take the pictures has changed too: iPhone 4, 5, 6S and 12 Pro. This, and having used 2 different apps, means that the pictures had many different resolutions:

I used an Automator service to resize all the pictures to 960x1280.

To extract the dates from the pictures, I discovered the very handy mdls terminal command:

mdls *.jpeg | grep -w kMDItemContentCreationDate > dates.txt

The following graph shows the frequency of the pictures taken. You can clearly see that I was a bit more disciplined at the beginning, and that I tend to forget about it for a couple of days, then remember for a couple of days.

We’ll see what happens to my face in the next 10 years.