Hands-Free Selfie Camera (Intervalometer)

You know taking selfies that don’t look like selfies is hard. Just put the camera down on a mailbox, bench, or tree branch. Turn on the camera to take one photo per second. Use that much higher quality back-facing camera. Without having to hold the camera, you are free to show your whole body. You can take motion shots. Want to try to impress your friends with one of those middle in the air jumping photos? Trust that the app will keep taking photo after photo on auto. Interact with your environment on the selfie. Hide behind a tree and peekaboo out. Pretend to chase a squirrel up a tree. You can truly express yourself and capture your true identity. If you do yoga, box, run, dance, or just do some mean squats, the app will faithfully keep clicking away photos one second at a time. When you are all done with a full bounty of hundreds of photos, the review tool will help you sift through the photos easily. Benefits: Say no to the selfie arm! Step out of the narrow viewfinder of a selfie! Replace low quality front-facing camera photos with high quality back-facing camera photos! Show your whole body! Take group photos with ease and without running. Get plenty of group shots automatically to catch the one shot where everyone smiles. Background: I wanted to take better selfies. I started with small tripod with flexible arms that attaches everywhere. The camera timer would take a photo after ten seconds. Because the back-facing camera on a phone has a much higher quality, I wouldn’t see what the camera sees. So, I had to take lots of timer photos to get one good one. The result was definitely worth it. The obvious question was why not have the camera take a photo every second. That avoids having to start the timer new each time and return to the position. Searching the Android Play Store, there are tons of camera apps. None seem to take continuous still photos. In photography, there is a special term: Intervalometer. Though, any intervalometer app is either meant to control a DSLR camera or makes timelapse videos (not still photos). The other option of simply taking frames out of a video is suboptimal as well. When the camera is in video mode, the quality is lower. Not only is the resolution lower, but the whole focus and light adjustment cycle can be optimized for still photos. Once I created the app to take continuous photos, it turned out that it quickly created 500 or 3,000 photos in a session. The traditional photo apps aren’t very good at reviewing all of those photos. One problem is that you may select a photo and scroll ten pages down. It’s very hard to get an idea of what kind of photos you already have. So, the camera comes with a photo review tool. When I have hundreds or thousands of photos to go through, I like to do one quick run down. Any photo that looks good gets pulled into the selection strip. Any time, I can scroll up and down in the selection strip to see which photos I have or if I have way too many photos of a certain type. After I delete the obviously bad photos (entirely black photo, out of focus, eyes closed), I review the photos again with a more careful eye and pull the best of the best into a selection strip. When doing the next round of selecting photos, it gets harder. It’s about letting go of some loved photos to focus on the true cream of the crop. Using the photo comparison tool, where I can see photos side by side, usually helps. Once I’m down to the absolute best photos of the shoot, I’ll export it to one of many photo editing apps.