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Using your Digital camera on the Command Line

31 August 2007

Linux has great digital camera support, because of the gphoto2 project, over 900 cameras will just work. Swmbo's Ubuntu computer has a nice graphical front end camera application, which I think came by default. Plug the camera in and it just pops up and does its stuff.

I have to use a camera sometimes at work, and I will take out whatever camera is free. My work PC runs Gentoo Linux, and I like to keep the install fairly minimal and focused, so I use the gphoto2 command line tool. gphoto2 has numerous options, but I only care about four of them.

Detect Camera

So I start by turning the camera to the correct mode and then plugging it in to the USB connection or dock. Then I run the --auto-detect option. This works as follows:

> $ gphoto2 --auto-detect
Model Port
----------------------------------------------------------
Panasonic DMC-FZ20 usb:

It has found a camera, so far so good.

List Photos

If we want to see what is on the camera, we can run --list-files, as follows:

> $ gphoto2 --list-files There are 20 files in folder
'/store_00010001/DCIM/100_PANA'.
#1 P1000980.JPG 2031 KB 2816x2112 image/jpeg
#2 P1000981.JPG 1938 KB 2816x2112 image/jpeg
#3 P1000982.JPG 2131 KB 2816x2112 image/jpeg
#4 P1000983.JPG 2059 KB 2816x2112 image/jpeg
 ...and so on...
#19 P1000998.JPG 1791 KB 2816x2112 image/jpeg
#20 P1000999.JPG 2021 KB 2816x2112 image/jpeg

As you can see I have edited some out.

Get Photos

Lastly we want to copy the photos off the camera. We can either just take them all ( --get-all-files ), or get a particular photo or range of photos (--get-file). The short form of these commands is -P and -p.

gphoto2 -P gphoto2 -p 7-13

So the first command gets all the photos, the second only gets photos numbered 7 to 13. That's all use it for, you can read all the other options by using the man page.

A Random Photo

To prove it works. Here is a random picture of me in my office with my main desktop:

Random Zeth

1 another gentoo user says...

well.., most cameras are in fact usb-sticks.

mount cp rm umount feh

Posted at 11:02 a.m. on February 26, 2009


2 kstep says...

You can as well try gphotofs (http://www.gphoto.org/proj/gphotofs/), so you can just mount camera as usual disk.

Posted at 3:01 p.m. on July 9, 2009


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Hello, my name is Zeth, I'll be your host here.

Command Line Warriors is about taking control of your own technology, it looks at our experiences of computing; especially using GNU/Linux, the Python programming language, the command-line and issues such as techno-ethics, best practices and whatever is cool now. If you take control of your technology then you are a Warrior too!

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