Timelapse Version 2.3.2.0 - A short explanation of its new features

This version is a significant release of Timelapse, where it includes two important features plus other lesser features:

  1. Folder levels and folder data (aka folder metadata, including metadata standards)
  2. New data field types
  3. Other miscellaneous additions

These features as well as others not mentioned here are completely described in the updated Timelapse Guides, including the new Timelapse Metadata Guide. As well, a new Practice image set is available that goes along with the updated guides.

We highly recommend trying out the new features on the practice image set. This will help you decide if you want to use these new features and, if so, how you can create a template that works for you.

Before getting into it, what about backwards compatability?

Let's say you open your image set with this latest version of Timelapse.

  • If you use the new features, you must continue to use the new version of Timelapse. If you open it with an older version, you will get an error message saying your file can't be open.
  • If you don't use the new features, you will be able to open your Timelapse files with older versions of Timelapse. However, you will get a warning message suggesting you should download the new version.

Folder levels, folder data and metadata standards

See the new Timelapse Metadata Guide and the updated Timelapse Template Guide for details.

This new version includes the ability to associate data with your folders via folder levels and folder data. Collectively, this creates a hierarchical data structure that adds considerable richness to the data you can associate with your image set.

Each file in your image set is just data that captures an image or video, which is then displayed by Timelapse. When you use Timelapse to enter data (tags), you are describing aspects of a particular image or video. Yet there may be other data that you want to record that would be unwieldy to do at a per image level. As a simple example (and this is just an example), you may want:

  • Project data describing details about the project, e.g., the project's name, purpose, and contact person;
  • Station data describing individual camera placements (the station), e.g., latitude/longitude coordinates specifying the station’s location, why that location was chosen, and the camera used;
  • Deployment data such as when a camera was serviced, the start and end dates of the images held in the retrieved SD card, and any issues noticed during that retrieval.

The example above can be viewed as an information hierarchy: a single project is the root of the hierarchy, where each project contains an arbitrary number of camera stations. In turn, each station can contain an arbitrary number of deployment periods. Finally, each deployment period will contain all the images retrieved from the SD card. To use folder-level data, Timelapse expects you to construct your sub-folder hierarchy in a way that mirrors your data information hierarchy. Timelapse can then associate data to individual folders, each representing a particular folder data node in the information hierarchy. Using the example above and depending on the stations and deployments you actually have, you could create the folder-level data hierarchy as follows. Root folder: project data (the root folder is the one containing your .tdb file)

  • Station1: Station 1 data
    • Deployment1a: data for Station1’s 1st deployment
      • Retrieved images stored in this folder
    • Deployment1b: data for Station1’s 2nd deployment
      • Retrieved images stored in this folder
  • Station2: Station 2 data
    • Deployment2a: data for Station2’s 1st deployment
      • Retrieved images stored in this folder
  • Other stations…

The hierarchical folder data structure means that all data relevant to an image is easily retrieved as fill-in editable fields. For example, consider an image in the Station1/Deployment1 folder. Because each Timelapse image stores its location in the folder hierarchy in its RelativePath, it can retrieve, display and make available for editing data about the project (its root folder), its station (the Station1 subfolder), and its deployment (the Station1/Deployment1a subfolder).

Metadata Standards and Folder data. Various agencies are now publishing metadata standards based on hierarchical data. This version of Timelapse includes two of them (via the Template Editor), with more to come in the future. Use of these standards promote data sharing between organizations. Standards can differ by their hierarchical structure, by the data fields they include, and by what data is optional vs. mandatory.

New data field types

Timelapse includes various types of data fields that you could customize in your template, where those data fields were specialized to the content they represented. These have been expanded to new data fields as listed below (data fields from previous versions are in italics).

  • Text:
    • Note for short text entry
    • Multiline for longer text entry, include those with multiple lines in it
    • Alphanumeric for text entry limited to letters (A-z), numbers (0-9), dashes "-" and underscore "_"
  • Numbers:
    • Counters,
    • IntegerPostive for positive integers
    • Integer for positive or negative integers
    • DecimalPositive for positive decimal numbers,
    • Decimal for positive or negative decimal numbers
  • Choice:
    • FixedChoice for a drop down menu where you can select one item from a list
    • MultiChoice for a drop down menu where you can select multiple items from a list
  • Date/Time
    • DateTime_ for a date plus time
    • Date for date only
    • Time for time only
  • Flag for true / false as a checkbox

Other miscellaneous additions

There are many other changes made to Timelapse, some internal, some as changes to the user interface, and some involving new features. New features include:

  • Folder data tab (a tab displaying your folder-levels for the current image and the data fields associated with that level)
  • File | Export all data to .csv files (to export folder data as described above to csv files)
  • Edit | Populate one or more Date/Time fields with Date/Time metadata
  • Edit | Populate a field with globally unique ids
  • Edit | Analyze folder structure (to see if it conforms with folder-level definitions)
  • Window | (changes to the menu to reflect a few alterations on how window arrangement can be configured)
  • Template Editor (various changes that allow you to create new types of data fields, and to specify folder levels and its associated folder data fields)