My Apple MacBook Air has a built in iSight camera. I wanted to have it take pictures automatically every minute and save them in a folder for an upcoming home improvement project, effectively turning it into a time lapse camera. It’s also good for being able to take pictures of people using your computer. Handy when used in combination with my phone home script. ;-)

Here are the steps.

  1. Download isightcapture, a command line utility for capturing images. Drag it into /Applications/ folder
  2. Make a folder for where you want the images stored. I used ~/isight_capture/.
  3. Set up a cronjob to take the pictures and name them with a minute in the filename. From terminal (you need to know vi:
    1. crontab -e
    2. Paste */2 * * * * /Applications/isightcapture ~/isight_capture/image.`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d_\%H_\%M`.jpg
    3. Save and quit

That’s it! Within one minute, you’ll start to see images in your ~/isight_capture folder every two minutes. Note that they will build up as long as the computer is on, which is about 15 megabytes a day. You may want to have something else that cleans them up. You could also try every 5 minutes instead with */5 for the minutes for the cron, which will do it every 5 minutes instead.