u/war4peace79

Hello everyone,

For several years now, I have been creating daily timelapses using snapshots from my surveillance cameras. Until recently, I was using Blue Iris to generate the snapshots, and a PowerShell simple script which would generate timelapses from the accumulated frames.

My method was simple: One frame every 5 seconds from each camera, then ffmpeg to create a timelapse video at 60 FPS, which would resolve to a 4m 48s video for each camera, per day, or something like that.

However, I recently moved off Blue Iris and switched to AgentDVR as my surveillance camera solution. While AgentDVR does offer a timelapse functionality, it could not satisfy my arguably niche requirements (one timelapse per day, per camera), so I started developing my own timelapse tool.

Now, before reading further, full disclaimed: I am not a software developer. While I have been working in the IT industry since 1996 and I had my brush with a relatively large amount of programming languages, my skillset lays elsewhere. Therefore, this tool was developed with the help of Claude Code.

With that out of the way, I have been using this tool for some time now, and it's been awesome. Works like a charm, as far as basic functionality goes. Now, it's not very mature, and there will be bugs, there always are. But the basics are ironed out and they work.

The tool is called Timelapse Maker (aptly named, I know... /s), it's completely free and open-source, and here are several of its main features (it has many smaller ones, but I would bore you to death if I listed them all):

• It is independent and works alongside Blue Iris or AgentDVR, or Frigate, for that matter.
• Works under both Linux and Windows (the most recent version, 0.2.0, is the first Windows release)
• Directly captures high quality snapshots from IP cameras (Dahua, Hikvision, Reolink and Tapo TC series tested personally)
• Generates daily timelapse videos from snapshot frames captured the day before, each night, soon after midnight.
• Optionally applies tmix smoothing per camera (smoothing width is configurable, I personally liked 15, but may go higher in my testing)
• Both capture cadence (how many seconds between frames), as well as target FPS are configurable, both globally, as well as per-camera. The global defaults are 5 seconds between frames and 60 FPS timelapse. Some of my cameras use 15 seconds between frames and 30 FPS video. It really depends on the scene they are capturing.
• Linux variant has a simple WebUI where you can see the tool status, play videos from the library, basic stuff, really.
• Notifications, configurable for Discord, ntfy.sh and Telegram. The tool notifies you if a camera suddenly refuses credentials, as well as after the whole set of daily timelapse videos is generated.
• Windows variant currently does not have a webUI or a monitoring tool, but that's captured in the developing roadmap.

Anyway, if you were looking for yet another timelapse tool, here it is. It currently has one happy user: me, and I am having fun developing it.

Of course, if you want a certain functionality from it, or encounter issues using it, feel free to either comment here, or create an issue on GitHub, and I will do my best to help.

Happy timelapsing :)

Băi, râd cu lacrimi!

I'll be honest with you: I was (and still am) reluctant to share this small project. I've seen many amazing things posted here, and mine is but a tiny speck by comparison, but I believe it might be useful to someone, so there goes nothing.

Me: I have worked in the IT industry since 1996. The first programming language I have truly worked with was Turbo Pascal 5.0 and 6.0. I brushed with Basic, QBasic, Assembler, Delphi, Visual Basic (and its Office-related VBA), tried Visual C# (and didn't click with it at all), learned basics of FoxPro (2.5+), but I became proficient at none. Instead, I focused on data: Business analytics, Business intelligence, the works. I moved up and down, left and right through the vast IT industry, but I always regretted not having ample opportunities to actually build software...

...Until now.

I have recently taken a good look at my photo library and realized I have thousands upon thousands of low-resolution digital photos, which, with the help of AI-based image upscaling solutions, could be, well, brought to 2026 as far as resolution is concerned.

Initially, I used ComfyUI with SeedVR 2.5 to upscale one photo at a time, then built some batch upscaling (workflow-based), then I decided to build a small software solution to automate this process. It initially was a simple, hacky command line-based Python script which called ComfyUI and upscaled pictures one by one. Stupid, slow and inefficient. So... I started from scratch and vibecoded a GUI tool which does that, and more. It's called [**Image Toolbox**](https://github.com/war4peace/image-toolbox) and it's free to use.

Here are the **current features** of the tool (version 0.1.8):

1. Everything is local by default. Nothing goes out of your PC unless you want to use a remote server (e.g. a remote Ollama on a different machine)
2. Image upscaling: Uses SeedVR 2.5 to upscale to desired resolution (default: 4K-ish, meaning it upscales to a maximum resolution of either 3840 on X or 2160 on Y, whichever is reached first). It's slow, but the result is high quality. Other target resolutions are available (2560/1440, 1920/1080). By default, the upscaling process ignores images which have original X or Y higher than 66% of the intended target. This is done to not waste computing power upscaling an image by small amounts. There are settings to override this behavior.
3. Tag & Rename: This functionality uses Ollama and a local model of choice to add image descriptions to EXIF, rename the image files with a shorter description, and detect image rotation and straighten them. qwen2.5vl:7b is the default description generator, but you can use any model. I have tested qwen2.5vl:7b, gemma3:4b and minicpm-v:latest, they all work. The rotation detection is performed by a small a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) model, very fast and pretty accurate. Auto-straightening is optional, and enabled by default.
4. The installer takes care of everything: .venv, model downloads, dependency installations and so on. This feature is actually something I would very much appreciate to receive feedback on, because it's not been tested on multiple machines.
5. (Optional) Discord notifications: Just add your Discord webhook in Settings and you're good to go.
6. SeedVR Settings for advanced users. Current settings are aimed at quality, but feel free to change them if you have a better idea.
7. Image preview film strip for both tools. The application loads images in batches of 100, and displays them in a section as thumbnails. Double-clicking a thumbnail opens it in your default image viewer. The currently-processed image is highlighted with a blue frame. You can increase/decrease thumbnail sizes, live.
8. Process pause, stop, resume: The application creates a cache file which contains information about which files have been processed, verifies states, etc. This means you can queue tens of thousands of images, process 500, stop everything, and when you start the application again, it will check its work against cache and skip the already-processed images. This survives restarts and application updates.
9. Undo functionality for Tag & Rename. If you don't like the generated descriptions, or for any reason, you can fully undo the results and your images will revert to their original file names.
10. **None of your original images are deleted! B**y default, upscaling saves the generated images into an \_\_upscaled\_\_ subfolder of your original photo folder. That target subfolder recreates all your original image folder tree and files. This is intentional: if you don't like the results, you will not lose your originals.
11. Separate log window: You can view it or close it, and it updates automatically. You can enable/disable autoscrolling. Each session end generates a summary in the log.
12. Settings and window sizes and positions are saved locally and survive subsequent application updates and restarts.

Current version, at the time of writing this post, is 0.1.8. I used Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.8 and two wonderful days of Fable 5) in VSCode. I have tested its functionality and upscaled, tagged and renamed around 11K images so far, using a RTX 3090 GPU.

Also, worth mentioning: I manually typed each character in this post. No AI was used. I owe the community at least that.

EDIT: I forgot "planned features". Of course I did.

**Planned features**:

1. Remote upscaling: spin up a runpod.io pod, point the application to the pod, and it will install requirements on the remote pod, use it to upscale images and shut it down when finished.
2. Image tree conciliation ("destructive" functionality): when you are satisfied with the upscaling results, the application will move upscaled images into your original folder tree and either place your originals in an archive folder of choice, or remove them.
3. In-app auto-update functionality: The application will check for updates, display patch notes, prompt to update, self-update.
4. HTTP interface
5. Home Assistant integration
6. Unraid Community Apps integration, so that you would be able to install and use the application on your Unraid server.

Have fun upscaling your images! Feedback, bug reports, as well as feature requests, are much appreciated.