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Abstract Time‐lapse photography provides an attractive source of information about snow cover characteristics, especially at the small catchment scale. The objective of this study was to design and test a monitoring system, which allows multi‐resolution observations of snow cover characteristics. The main aim was to simultaneously investigate the spatio‐temporal patterns of snow cover, snow depth and snowfall interception in the area very close to the camera, and the spatio‐temporal patterns of snow cover in the far range. The multi‐resolution design was tested at three sites in the eastern part of the Austrian Alps (Hochschwab‐Rax region). Digital photographs were taken at hourly time steps between 6:00 and 18:00 in the period November, 2004 to December, 2006. The results showed that the time‐lapse photography allows effective mapping of the snow depths at high temporal resolution in the region close to the digital camera at many snow stake locations. It is possible to process a large number of photos by using an automatic procedure for accurate snow depth readings. The digital photographs can also be used to infer the settling characteristics of the snow pack and snow interception during the day. Although it is not possible to directly estimate the snow interception mass, the photos may indeed give very useful information on the snow processes on and beneath the forest canopy. The main advantage of using time‐lapse photography in the far range of the digital camera is to observe the spatio‐temporal patterns of snow cover over different landscape configurations. The results illustrate that digital photographs can be very useful for parameterising processes such as sloughing on steep slopes, snow deposition in gullies and snow erosion on mountain ridges in a distributed snow model. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.