Got photos? Yes, you do. Everyone with a smartphone has more photos than we can count. We turn mountains of photos into photo collages, into photo galleries, sometimes into slow motion movies. What else?
How about taking a very large number of photos and doing the reverse by turning them into a time lapse video. You can do that on newer iPhones, of course, but you have to do while waiting. What if you could transform photos into a time lapse video on your Mac?
Glue, Meet Motion
Every now and then I come across a new Mac app that does something so well, so simply, so ably, that there just isn’t much to say about it. Get it. Use it. Thank me later. GlueMotion is like that. Utterly simplistic and utterly useful for a single purpose. Time lapse videos.
First, take a bunch of photos; hundreds of photos, even a few thousand. Sort and adjust them as you need. Then, click to build a time lapse movie from static photos.
Selecting which photos to use in the time lapse is the easy part. But not all batches of photos are created equal, so there’s a built-in image editor included in GlueMotion.
This isn’t Photoshop, of course, but you get plenty of options for each image that range from crop and size to scale, from exposure to saturation to brightness and contrast, as well as a few more.
Not bad, right?
Time lapse on a few hundred photos can present a few problems, and one of them is the difference in brightness between images.
GlueMotion has an answer for that and it’s built-in, too. It’s the Deflicker Settings which help to set the optimal brightness for each image in the set. You can even set a particular region on a photo to have the brightness reduced.
You set the area or select the photo and GlueMotion does the work.
IF there is an easier way to assemble a few hundred photos into a stack, then organize them to create a time lapse video– including batch processing and options to deflicker bright photos– I don’t know where to find it. Hey, it’s even drag and drop.
Glue Motion costs a few dollars but saves an enormous amount of time and does to hundreds or thousands of photos that which few other apps can do. What else would I like? A plugin for Apple’s Mac Photos app would be nice.
