See How You've Changed Over Time In A Time Lapse With Everyday
Everyday ($1.99) by Little Pixels is an app that makes it easy to create a time lapse video of yourself over time.
Have you ever wanted to create a time lapse video of yourself over a year? Maybe five years? Whatever the length of time may be, the trouble may be with remembering to take a photo of yourself everyday. We get busy, and forget. It's that simple. But what if there was an app to help us remember, and actually help with the photographing process? Well, there is. It's time to meet Everday.
Everyday will allow you to keep track of your self-portraits everyday. The shots will be kept organized by day and month, and when the time comes to it, year. You can also import photos from your Camera Roll if you have already started your time-lapse photos. However, there is a problem with this that I will address in a bit.
Once you get your first snapshot, you'll be asked to align your eyes, mouth, and nose. This is to create a "ghost" version of yourself that will appear when you take your snapshot the next day. Additionally, you can also display the actual alignment grid along with your "ghost" image.
The purpose of the ghost image and grid is to align your face with them the next day so that the end result of the time-lapse video is your face in the same spot in all the images (or as close as it can be), with the background constantly changing. The ghost and grid are both completely optional - you can have neither on if you choose to.
When you have used the app enough to capture a good handful of self-portraits, you can generate a preview of your time-lapse video. This can be accessed with the film-icon button in the top right. Everyday will take all the images so far and generate a video, which you can preview before you actually save it into your Camera Roll. The video speed can be adjusted between Fast, Slow, and Normal.
Now, I mentioned earlier that this app can help you remember to take your daily mug. How? By setting up simple reminders! In the Settings panel of Everyday, you can create your own personal reminders of when you should snap your pic. But the app will also create one automatically after your first photo.
These reminders will show up as local notifications, so there will be no need for your device to contact the servers, which is a plus. You can set up as many reminders as you need, so there should be no excuse for missing a day.
If your'e the type that likes to share, you can also hook up your Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and Twitter accounts. There's a setting that will automatically upload your daily mug to the site you specify, or you can send any photo taken to the site manually. Email is another method that can be used for individual photos.
Along with the social network setup in the Settings are some other options. These include Export All to Camera Roll or Import from Camera Roll. Everyday captures can also be saved automatically to the device Camera Roll, and the alignment guide can be reset if needed.
I have a problem with the Import option. Since I've started my own "2011 time-lapse" project, I thought I could simply import all of my photos up to this point and it would be organized as it should be. That's where the problem lies. I ended up having 72 photos in March, a handful for February, and only two for January. I even found the photos out of order - ones I took in January ended up in March, etc. I'd advise against using the import option if you've already started your own time-lapse project, unless you are fine with everything being out of order. I ended up deleting the app and reinstalling to start on a clean slate, since it would have been a lot of work to delete all those photos manually (no batch delete option).
Overall, I recommend Everyday if you have not started your own time-lapse project and want to see how your face changes over time (these videos are actually very interesting to look back on). It's also great if you would rather not do the work of creating the end-result video yourself (that does take time).
The interface is well-designed and slick, and most importantly, easy-to-use. The only thing that needs some improvement is the import method - would be great if I can import my existing photos without them being scrambled up into a huge headache.
For $1.99, it's a great way to get started on your time-lapse video project!
