Sn-Emus!

Record snowfall in the Snowies and these fellas are loving it! Benefits of data collection in Kosciuszko

Emu in the snow!

Sorting Trail Camera Images for DigiKam

So DigiKam is a very useful tool to manage collections of images particularly from remote sensing wildlife cameras such as the Reconyx Hyperfire. However this program wasn’t made specifically for these game cameras so for the moment it’s lacking direct capability to sort between some of the motion triggered vs time lapse images. Luckily I’ve found a way around this and get back to sorting data in DigiKam.

Although Reconyx cameras use an exif readable tag in their images, DigiKam only reads a specific subset of that so the TriggerMode tag is left out. However, DigiKam does read the caption tag so my methodology is:

  1. Conditionally set the caption tag to “Time Lapse” if the TriggerMode tag equals “Time Lapse”. This will skip putting the caption on motion triggered.
  2. Re-load the metadata in DigiKam

Presto! That’s it! You’re done! Simple fix but trying to sort directly through Digikam wasn’t going to happen.

Here’s the exiftool command that I was able to sucessfully use to separate my motion triggered from time lapse.

exiftool -r -Caption="Time Lapse" 
-if "$TriggerMode eq 'Time Lapse'" DIR

Note: The quotations in the -if option are for analysis on a PC. This can be done on a Mac you just need to change up your quotation schema

Winter fieldwork

It’s wintertime and time for another data collection session!

It’s hovering around 0 Celsius with some periodic snow showers here in Kosciuszko NP. This cold weather may suppress invertebrate scavengers and microbes but allows us to look at the direct contribution vertebrates have on carrion.

Setting up a trail camera with a standard height, angle, distance, and kick-butt mountain-man beard