I was looking through some old photos on my iPhone the other day, reminiscing. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of photos from the period of time I was scrolling through. My craving for personal nostalgia was not fully satisfied. Luckily, I remembered another place I might find a few more memories to peruse: my iSight Capture folder in my Dropbox archive.

To spare you the headache of reading that meandering, ill-framed, eight-year-old blog post, here’s the gist of what I built back in 2012.

I set up a bash script and launchd task that used a CLI tool I found called isightcapture to take a photo through my MacBook Pro’s iSight camera every 2 hours, and put them in a Dropbox folder.

I had some grand idea that this would help me locate my laptop if it were ever stolen; giving me photographic clues to its location. Which was incredibly stupid.

But, in setting up this little script, I inadvertently created a sort of photo diary for myself. These incredibly unremarkable images gave me a consistent snapshot of my day-to-day life that, as the months and years passed, became an incredible record of one of the more interesting (to me) periods of my life.

The photos themselves are terrible quality. They’re 640x480 resolution. They’re dark, grainy, and usually framed badly. In some cases, you can barely even see me. But I can see me.

I can see the frustration and immaturity on my face in 2012 — my last year at Intel — before I left to pursue…something I hadn’t worked out yet.

I can see myself doing everything in my power to suppress a sea of self-doubt when I found myself working in the Sandwich Video office for a few weeks in 2013. I was absolutely exhausted driving back and forth between Phoenix and Los Angeles probably a dozen times over the course of a few months. But I was (and still am) so grateful for everything I learned from that experience.

I can see the unexpected enthusiasm on my face as I taught two semesters of post-production finishing and vfx at the film school at Scottsdale Community College; taking over for a professor who had moved away.

There are the backstage photos of those sales and marketing conferences I worked. The ones where we basically didn’t sleep for three days, shooting and editing around the clock.

I see my temporary office setup in the family room of my dad’s house where I lived for a month after moving back to Phoenix from San Jose. Behind me in the photos are the dozens of moving boxes my now-wife and I couldn’t unpack until we found a new place to live. (I really didn’t plan that career/life transition well at all.)

I can see a whole lot in those crappy, automated webcam photos.

May 26, 2016

I don’t remember why, but in May of 2016, my script broke. This is the last photo it took.

I figured I’d find a way to fix it, at some point. Eventually, though, I just gave up and moved the folder of images into my unsynced Dropbox archive folder.

But, looking through those old photos gave me the motivation to give it another shot.

ImageSnap

In the years since my script broke, isightcapture has been abandoned. I found a thread in a forum somewhere mentioning ImageSnap as a potential replacement, and it turned out to be perfect for my needs.

First of all, it’s able to capture the full resolution of my 2020 iMac’s new 1920x1080 FaceTime camera. Still, each photo is only about 250 KB.

Second, it’s much faster than isightcapture. Both apps, when taking a photo, activated the camera’s green “active” light (as they should). But with isightcapture, I was occasionally able to notice the green light in my peripheral vision, look at the camera, and pose for the photo. So far, no matter how quick my reaction time, each photo taken by ImageSnap has been captured before my eyes were able to dart up to the camera. Which is exactly what I want.

I’m genuinely surprised just how fast it is. Especially because the command I’m using to take the photo includes a one second delay to let the camera “warm up”. The hardware (apparently) needs that to avoid occasionally taking an underexposed image.

Here’s the single-line shell script that takes the photo:

/usr/local/bin/imagesnap -d "FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)" -q -w 1 /Users/dansturm/Dropbox/Photos/iSight_Capture/$(date +"%F—%H-%M-%S").jpg

Automator?

I’m running this script by way of an Automator “Application” because, thanks to macOS Catalina, things that access the camera of my Mac need to throw a macOS system permissions dialogue box so I can grant them explicit access to the hardware. Currently [1], running the command directly inside Keyboard Maestro does not cause the system to prompt for camera permissions, so the command fails.

Not to worry, though. We’ll use Keyboard Maestro to launch the Automator application at the interval of our choosing because it has great trigger options.

Having the app take a photo every two hours was never ideal. A full third of the images are just black because they were taken in the dead of night. And another third were of my empty office chair. Not terribly interesting.

So, this time around, I set the macro to trigger at 10am, 1pm, and 4pm. Three times I can almost guarantee I’ll be sitting at my desk, in front of the camera. And the Keyboard Maestro trigger is flexible enough that, if I decide later to expand the window of time or frequency of images, it’s an easy adjustment.

It’s a little strange how excited I was to get this thing working again. My life is far less unpredictable than it was eight years ago, and it’s likely that I’ll just end up with hundreds of photos that looks exactly the same, featuring nothing of any real interest.

But, you know, that’s exactly what I thought the first time I set it up.

Thanks to Dr. Drang and Peter N Lewis for helping me diagnose this issue. And it sounds like Peter is working on a fix. ↩