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Appendix

Application Icon   Webcams

Start or stop periodic loading of webcam and slideshow stickies, reload webcams manually, or automatically wait for updates. See Control menu or General tab of Inspector.

PhotoStickies tries (at least) up to three times to load a webcam picture initially. If this fails (e.g. corrupted data, missing file, no Internet connection etc.) the program stops loading and beeps without opening a window. Just try to reload this image again.

Note: If a sticky has been successfully opened problems occurring afterwards are harmless (just dropping some frames in that case).

PhotoStickies supports HTTP authentication (http://user:password@host/path/file.ext), HTTP referrers (usually automatically set to the host of the image), and cookies.

Waiting mode

Waiting is not as bandwidth-consuming as a "started" cam. If there has been no update for at least three frames the interval will be automatically increased as long as the image remains the same. As soon as a new image will be available, PhotoStickies will use the original interval again and bounce the application icon to get your attention.

This mode is especially useful for monitoring or recording lots of webcams exceeding the limit of your Internet connection or if you need your bandwidth for other concurrent tasks (e.g. surfing/mailing at the same time).

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    0.01 to 5 seconds: Increased to max. 1 minute
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    5 to 30 seconds: Increased to max. 5 minutes
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    30 to 60 seconds: Increased to max. 10 minutes
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    1- to 15 minutes: Increased to max. 15 minutes
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    > 15 minutes: No change

The range of the currently used interval while waiting is marked with - signs in the Interval sub-menu and displayed in the Inspector.

Also, PhotoStickies retrieves only modified data since the last access to reduce the bandwidth usage furthermore.

Recording

You can record original or filtered images of webcams. Filtered images are saved as LZW-compressed TIFF files to prevent a loss of quality.

PhotoStickies recognizes if there's a new image available and therefore doesn't record the same unmodified image endlessly. The first frame of automatically opened windows (e.g. of favorites or when reverting to a saved state) is not recorded if the webcam is waiting for changes or stopped (see above).

Recorded images are placed into the directory "~/Pictures/PhotoStickies" (where ~ is your home folder) with a unique folder for every URL. Inside this folder PhotoStickies creates optionally another folder (format "year-month-day hour-minute") every time you start recording.

Turn on the option Record To Date Subfolders to enumerate the images and later convert them to a movie with QuickTime Player using Open image sequence. If this open is unchecked the filename of all recorded images contains the date and time. This is useful if you want to combine the recordings of multiple sessions.

Replaying of all currently recorded images of a webcam is almost identical to slideshows except that you don't have to open a directory, that replaying starts automatically and that all images are always shown in chronological order.