SharpCap Forums

I'm a newcomer to both sharpcap and astrophotography, and I'm probably doing it wrong.

I don't have any kind of tracking mount or EQ platform, so as a first test, I aimed my scope at Polaris so it would at least more-or-less stay in frame, with some rotation. Using an exposure time near 1 second, I left the "live stack" mode to run overnight, while saving and resetting the resulting stack every 1 minute. Apparently, I had the File/SharpCap Settings/Filenames option "Organize captured files into subfolders" checked, as shown in https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.1/#Filename%20Settings

So now I have many hundreds of folders saved 1 minute apart which contain an image frame, of the form

C:\Users\beale\Desktop\SharpCap Captures\2024-07-13\Capture\02_14_30\processed\Stack_65frames_60s.png
C:\Users\beale\Desktop\SharpCap Captures\2024-07-13\Capture\02_15_30\processed\Stack_65frames_60s.png
C:\Users\beale\Desktop\SharpCap Captures\2024-07-13\Capture\02_16_31\processed\Stack_65frames_60s.png

and so on, but the actual PNG image filename is the same in every case, being distinguished only by the name of the parent folder. Maybe next time I'll try unchecking the "subfolders" option.
Anyway, having already done what I did, is there some easy way to extract all those PNG images from each sub-folder, rename them to indicate the time or at least some sequence number, and put them all into the same folder, for subsequent processing?

Hi,

welcome to the forums!

For future sessions, you can either try turning off the options for subfolders or you can use the option for custom filename templates (
https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.1/#Filename%20Templates) to put for example the time and date into the filename as well as the folder name.

For the current folder full of files of the same name, I would suggest first making a full copy of the whole folder (just in case something goes wrong) - then you can start a command prompt in the '2024-07-13' folder and run the following command
Note that I didn't invent that myself - I found it in this answer to basically the same question : https://superuser.com/a/1104595 - there is some explanation there about what it does and how, which may be worth checking out before running it!

cheers,

Robin