Photo TimeStamp Analysis Program

This is a simple java program that processes a set of JPEGs resulting from KAP sessions, telling you the interval between each photo and the next, the average interval and some general EXIF info (derived from the first image in the session). The program runs under Windows XP, Mac OS X and possibly Linux and seems to cope with cameras from Canon, Pentax, Nikon, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Olympus (it probably works for most cameras that support EXIF).

The User Interface
The program has a simple GUI (no menus, no use of SWING) that looks like this: At the top of the GUI window are four key values:

Directory
this is the folder the program will process. You can set this by "dragging and dropping" a folder here.
You can also change it by clicking on the Browse button which brings up a standard file chooser dialog. Just browse away until the directory you want to process is being displayed then click 'Open' - ignore the part of the dialog asking you for a file name.
Interval
This value, in seconds, determines the 'break point' for KAP sessions. By default it's 3600 (one hour) which means that any gap between successive photos that exceeds an hour will cause the program to summarise the existing photos and then start a new session. For AutoKAP a value of 60 is probably appropriate - an interval any longer than a minute almost certainly means you've brought the kite down and adjusted the camera.
Depth
A value of 0 means the program will just process the selected directory. A value of 1 means it will also process the first level subdirectories, and so on. Setting this parameter to 1 makes it easy to deal with KAP sessions using cameras which start a new folder on the card every 100 photos.
Output File
this is where the report is written when you click the Write Report button. By default it will be written to a file called 'timestamps.lst' in the directory containing the jar file.

Below these four input fields is the Report Area and a message area. Below that are three buttons:

Clear Report
clears the report area
Process Files
processes all the JPEG files in the selected directory (and subdirectories if Depth is greater than 0)
Write Report
writes the report to the given output file

Some things to note about the GUI:

there is some checking of the parameters - for example if you set Depth negative, or non-numeric, you'll get a message about it.
the program remembers the values you set in a properties file (TS.properties) and uses them as a starting point the next time you run the program.
the properties file is editable with any text editor
The program is smart enough to ignore intervals of 0, which can arise if you edit photos (to crop, change the size etc) and put the result in the same directory. There's an example in the second session in the image above.

Downloading

You can download a ZIP file containing the program by clicking here. For OSX users, there's an App version here

Installation

The downloadable ZIP file contains two files, TS.jar and TS.properties. Put the TS.jar file in any convenient directory. Put the supplied TS.properties there too. Mac users who download the App version should just install the app in the Applications directory in the usual way.

Running the Program

Just display the folder containing the jar and properties files and double click on the jar file. That should bring up the GUI. If it doesn't try this:

open a command prompt window. In Windows that means going to the Start menu, clicking 'Run...', typing 'cmd' and pressing Enter.
change the directory to the one containing the jar and properties files
type the commmand
```
   java -cp TS.jar TSUI
```
If this doesn't work, you should get some sort of error message. Let me know what it is and I'll try and help, or go here

For further information and bug reports, contact Dave@zenoshrdlu.com

Acknowledgements

I'm deeply grateful to Drew Noakes whose MetaData-Extractor java package greatly simplified the task of extracting EXIF data.

For other Java software, primarily related to CHDK, see here.