Needle in a haystack

[HaPeKa]

I want to use an interval shooting function to photograph activity at a nest cavity.
During the early phase of the breeding season, visits for food delivery are very rare, maybe only once or twice a day. And those visits usually last less than a minute.

With a 3-second interval, I end up with 9999 nearly identical photos after 8 hours, with only a few that actually show something different. Going through all these images manually would be incredibly time-consuming.

Does anyone know how to find the relevant pictures? In EXIF Data they might have a higher BrightnessValue or lower ISO than the whole bunch. How can I find the needles in the haystack?

[greybeard]

Not quite the answer you are looking for - but the way I would do this is to load the images into something like Apple Photos and set the display to show small thumbnails - the images with differences should show up.

[StarGeek]

You might also try various duplicate image checking programs. DupeGuru and Czkawka have image checking modes.

Most Digital Asset Management (DAM) programs, such as Digikam and Lightroom can also find similar looking images.

You can try looking through the metadata to see if there might be a difference. Compare the data of a good image and a bad image and see if anything pops. You could then dump that tag into a CSV file (see the -csv option) and sort that.

Maybe the -plot option (also see ExifTool Plot Feature) might be useful for this.

[HaPeKa]

Thank you, I'm going to try to find a difference between the 'empty' picture and the picture with a match. Then I'll now, what parameter to compare and dump (or plot)