As our steel bar surface is doused with a range of solvents on a daily basis, the pattern on it changes over time. I wanted to shoot a time lapse of it to watch it seethe. I was thinking like: a photo a day for six months.

First, I bought a Brinno camera, which is advertised as a time-lapse camera for job sites, with long battery life. They have 8 models, no grid comparing the features or specs, and no rhyme or reason to their pricing or model number ordering. I bought the one that claimed it had 20x optical zoom, but that was a lie, it's unadjustable super-wide-angle just like the others. The only way to get photos off of it is to pop the card. It's junk.

So then I got a GoPro Hero 7 Black. This might be a really nice camera if I was wearing it on my helmet, but for what I'm trying to do, it seems to be complete crap.

First, the maximum delay between photos is 60 seconds. So that's a whole lot of extra photos that I don't need. Which means I will have to offload those photos every few days to avoid filling up the card.

Getting photos off of it is incredibly tedious:

1. Connect phone to GoPro over some Frankenfuckery that requires both Bluetooth and a private wifi network, WTF;
2. Stop camera from recording;
3. Download photos from GoPro to GoPro phone app (very slow);
4. Delete photos from GoPro;
5. Adjust camera zoom, because it resets every time;
6. Start camera recording again;
7. Transfer photos from GoPro phone app to Photos app (very slow);
8. Delete photos from GoPro phone app;
9. Finally you can get the photos from your phone to your computer.

Maybe this would be slightly less awful if I was paying them $10/month for their Clown Service, but fuck that noise.

Also it just... turns off at random. It's on unswitched wall power and it won't seem to stay awake for longer than 16 hours. Several times it has stopped after exactly 81 shots (minutes). There's a "go to sleep after" setting which defaults to 15 minutes but I have set to "none" and this is still happening. Also 81 is notably not 15.

And sometimes, my phone just won't connect to it. Rebooting the phone didn't work, but rebooting the GoPro did -- you know how you do that? You get up on a ladder, pull it down from the ceiling, unplug the wall power, take it out of the case, and pull the battery because there's no actual power button. Super convenient.

So, I've got this old cracked iPhone 6, and now I'm thinking maybe I should just tape that to the ceiling and run some time-lapse software on that instead. Probably should have started with that.

Dear Lazyweb, any recommendations on iOS time-lapse software? What I'm looking for is:

• Ability to set the delay between shots to a large number, preferably 1 to 24 hours;
• Ability to offload photos/videos without needing to un-mount the phone from the ceiling or attach a computer to it;
• Bonus points if it will upload the photos/videos to iClown or Dropbox or somesuch on a semi-regular basis.