Instabilities in the experimental setup can, despite all experimental effort, lead to a slow, creeping shift (called drift) of the specimen's image on the camera detector. In this case, the quality of the resulting image is greatly degraded because structures appear smeared in the direction of the drift.

In most cases, the drift is small and approximately linear over the course of the acquisition. Such a drift can be corrected by substracting the drift velocity times the time elapsed since acquisition start from each image.

A convenient way to fine-tune drift correction is to add a time-hued image display as a child of the localization filter and optimize the settings for a mostly white or, at least, largely color-uncorrelated image.