Timelapse Storage Calculator
Estimate timelapse frame count, photo storage requirement, final clip duration and time-compression ratio from interval settings.
Plan timelapse frames and storage
Estimate frame count, card/storage use and final clip duration from interval capture settings.
How the Timelapse Storage Calculator works
Timelapse planning starts with capture duration and interval. The tool estimates captured frames from total capture seconds ÷ interval, including the initial frame, then multiplies frame count by the average file size. Final clip duration is frame count ÷ playback fps, and the compression ratio compares real elapsed time with finished video time.
How to use this timelapse storage calculator
Enter the total time you expect the camera to run, the interval between exposures, an average RAW or JPEG file size and your intended output frame rate. For variable-size compressed files, use a conservative average from a test sequence. The result lets you check both memory-card capacity and whether the finished clip will be long enough.
How to interpret the result
Shorter intervals produce more frames, use more storage and create slower apparent motion when played at the same fps. A longer capture can create a surprisingly short final clip: thousands of seconds in real time may compress into only seconds on screen. The real-time compression metric makes that relationship explicit.
Assumptions and limitations
The estimate does not include duplicate backup cards, video proxies, sidecar files, camera-generated JPEG+RAW pairs or filesystem overhead. Some intervalometers count the first exposure differently. Long shutter speeds also need to fit inside the chosen interval, and battery/thermal limits may end a sequence before the planned duration.
Practical example and workflow
A four-hour sequence at a five-second interval produces about 2,881 frames when the starting frame is included. At 24 fps, that is roughly two minutes of finished footage. If each RAW averages 25 MB, storage is about 70 GB, so a photographer can choose card capacity before leaving the camera unattended.