SmoothLapse is coming back

SmoothLapse started in 2020 with a simple frustration: long-term time-lapses flicker. Take one photo a day for a year and you get a year of weather flashing past, sunny in one frame and grey in the next. The usual answer is to fix it afterwards, but software can only do so much with a bad photo.

The idea behind SmoothLapse was to stop the problem before it starts. Instead of one photo a day, a Raspberry Pi takes photos all day long. It compares each one with the photo it kept yesterday and throws away everything except the closest match. Between 2020 and 2021 that idea grew into working software: a capture service that ran on the Pi, a web page for lining up the camera and managing time-lapses, and a way to turn the results into a video.

Why it went quiet

Development stopped at the end of 2021, and since then the ground has shifted. Raspberry Pi OS moved to a new camera system called libcamera, and recent releases removed the old camera stack that SmoothLapse was built on. Newer boards and cameras, such as the Raspberry Pi 5 and Camera Module 3, only work with the new system.

So the original SmoothLapse won’t run on a Raspberry Pi you buy today. Rather than leave it there, we’re rebuilding it.

What’s changing

• A new camera layer. Capture is being rebuilt on libcamera, the camera system in current Raspberry Pi OS, so SmoothLapse works with today’s boards and cameras.
• Modern foundations. Parts of the original software have reached the end of their supported life. They’re being brought up to date, including a move to 64-bit.
• Smarter selection. We’re exploring ways to make the choice of photo even better, such as comparing the lighting on the parts of a scene that don’t change.

What stays the same

The core idea, and the promise that comes with it: every frame in your time-lapse is a real, unedited photo. SmoothLapse chooses the best photo. It never paints over a bad one.

It will still be built for long, patient projects: a building going up, a garden through the seasons, a landscape changing over years. Those are the projects where a fixed schedule suffers most from the weather, and where picking the right moment makes the biggest difference.

What’s next

We’ll share progress on this blog as the rebuild comes together, along with a side-by-side comparison filmed on the new version. If you’d like to be one of the first to try it, join the early-access list below. We’ll email you when it’s ready, plus the odd update along the way.