Storage & RAW
Every-frame RAW is expensive: measured on a 12 MP camera it is ~37 GB per night. A 256 GB card holds about a week. The settings screen shows your rig’s own figure before you commit to it, and warns about sustained write wear — a microSD card can fail suddenly after months of that, having given no warning.
Recommendations
Section titled “Recommendations”| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| JPEG timelapses, RAW for keepers only | Any 64 GB+ microSD. Tap Save RAW on the dashboard when something happens. |
| RAW on a schedule (every N minutes) | A high-endurance microSD, 128 GB+. |
| Every-frame RAW | An external USB SSD. Card endurance is the problem, not just capacity. |
How the image store works
Section titled “How the image store works”- Frames land in
/var/lib/skylapse/images/<camera>/<date>/, one night per folder, with the day rolling over at local noon so a whole night stays together. - Every frame has a JSON sidecar next to it with its capture metadata — what the nights browser charts and what a future keogram/startrail tool would read.
- Skylapse deletes the oldest nights automatically when free space runs low: frames first, timelapses last, so a full card never stops capture.
- DNG pixels are never changed. White-balance multipliers are recorded in the file for your raw editor (Lightroom, Siril, PixInsight) to apply.
Getting nights off the camera
Section titled “Getting nights off the camera”- Download any frame or timelapse from the nights browser.
- USB export — plug a stick into the Pi, open the night, tap export. The copy is verified, and a config backup goes alongside it.
- External image store on a permanently attached USB SSD is the intended setup for every-frame RAW. It is specified but not built yet as a guided feature — see Status & roadmap. Today the
SKYLAPSE_IMAGESvariable relocates the store (see Development).