I was wondering why one of my AWS accounts had almost 1TB of data in S3. Turns out I never cleaned up the images from Shipping News -- a project where I captured a photo every 30 seconds from my office window, saved it to S3, and ran image recognition to detect boats passing by on the Hudson.

I've been doing a lot with ffmpeg lately, so I thought I'd see if I could make a quick timelapse. This is just the first day I captured, but I think I have about a year of data...

It's been offline for a couple years now. I started getting lots of false positives, so I "temporarily" turned it off.

I've still been meaning to take the images with detected boats and try some labeling/training with YOLO. I'd love to bring it back online if I can get more reliable detection.

It would be cool to do a full year timelapse with detection -- slowing down when boats are crossing the screen, and speeding up when not much is happening.

This is what makes me a digital hoarder. Now I'm never going to be able to delete these images!

technology timelapse river aws photography