I spent months trying to photograph the same view every week and kept failing.
So I built an app that solves it.
The idea sounds trivial: point the camera at the same thing, once a week, for
a year. Then play it back.
The hard part isn't taking the photo. It's finding the shot again. Days pass
between captures. You don't remember exactly where you stood, how far you
zoomed, or how you held the phone. Every existing time-lapse app I tried
assumed the phone sits on a tripod and shoots every few seconds — which is a
completely different problem.
So I built Chronikon. The core of it is the viewfinder: your reference image
sits on top of the live view while you shoot. Three ways to look at it —
semi-transparent overlay, just the contours as lines, or a difference view
where dark means aligned. A percentage tells you how close you are, and there's
an auto shutter that fires by itself once you're back in the best spot.
The part I'm most proud of is the reminder. For outdoor projects you can anchor
it to the sun instead of the clock: the app computes when the sun will be at
the same height above the horizon as it was in your reference image. Over a
year, the time of comparable light shifts by hours. A fixed 7pm reminder gives
you bright summer evenings and pitch-black winter ones. Anchored to the sun,
the light stays comparable.
Other things in there: it can store the capture location and guide you back
with an arrow and a distance reading. Rendering can compensate the offset
between frames and match their brightness so the video doesn't flicker.
Some deliberate choices:
- Everything stays on the device. No account, no server, no upload.
- No ads.
- No subscription. Free version is limited (2 projects, 100 images each,
watermark on the video). The full version is a one-time purchase.
I'm a vehicle engineer, not a full-time app developer — this was a side project
that got a little out of hand.
Let me know what you're thinking.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.timboehmeconsulting.chronikon
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