By Joe Mehaffey
I bought a InetCam four channel camera scanning and recording system about a year ago to store images from security cameras. I had a few occasions to go look for images from a particular time period and it was VERY VERY difficult. If you have a month of images from four cameras, this turns out to be 3600 images an hour and 86,400 per day per camera. All of the picture viewers I could find "choked" when confronted by maybe two and a half million images in a single file as InetCam now stores them.
I decided that I needed to "spread out" these files into hourly groups. I now have a program that is able to perform as follows:
C:\CAMERA1 is the directory (folder) for camera 1.
C:\CAMERA1\PICTURES is the directory where InetCam stores the current
pictures.
My program is operated HOURLY by a scheduler which activates a file
called CAMERA1.VBS.
The CAMERA1.VBS file performs the following tasks:
1) It transfers the 3600 files created during the past hour from
c:\camera1\pictures to folder c:\camera1\mmddhh where mm is the month,
dd is the day of the month and hh is the hour (24 hour format).
2) The program checks daily to see if any files are more than 60
days old and if so, it deletes these older files.
This program takes about 8 seconds to run each hour and so can lose up to 8 images during the transfer process. (Sorry, the faster approach of making a batch file or VBS script do a directory rename and make a new directory was not possible in Windows 2000 (Thanks MicroSoft!) though it does work in Windows 98 just fine.)
This scheme has been checked out in Windows 2000, NT and Windows 98. I use four different scripts, one for each of the four cameras, to transfer files hourly for each camera.
This is not a perfect fix but it does get me by for now. A much better fix would be if InetCam software had the ability to make a new MMDDHH directory every hour inside a specified camera's folder. However, InetCam expressed little interest in this so I was forced to take this approach.
I do not intend to do any further development, but if this scheme seems useful to you, contact me and we can work something out.