gPhoto for GNU Photographers

by Eric Foster-Johnson

April 4, 2002 —

The latest trend in desktop computing has emerged from the effort to
organize the ever-increasing number of digital devices entering our
lives. Users now have Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), digital still
cameras, digital video cameras, digital video recorders, scanners...the
list goes on and on.

Apple Computer, for example, touts its Macintosh systems as the answer
to the question: How do you make all your digital devices communicate?
While Linux doesn't have as much publicity exposing it, your Linux
system can also help you manage your devices.

For years, Linux has supported pilot-link and other applications that
synchronize PalmOS PDAs with your Linux desktop. The SANE interface,
for example, allows Linux to support most scanners. The most common new
devices, though, is clearly the digital camera. Falling prices and
improving picture resolutions has made digital cameras a popular toy
and a perfect integrate with your PC. After all, where else will you
view the image files captured by the camera.

A package called gPhoto can help transfer your digital images onto your
Linux PC. gPhoto supports more than 105 types of digital cameras, which
are listed at http://www.gphoto.org/cameras.html. The list includes
most major cameras, but not all of the really cheap cameras.

gPhoto has been around for a while, but a recent improvement has
changed the package into something new. In a drastic departure from
gPhoto 1, gPhoto 2 no longer provides a graphical application. Instead,
gPhoto 2 provides a library that allows you to access digital cameras
from other applications. The library includes a command-line program
you can use to run gPhoto 2, but most users instead will want to use
one of the graphical applications built on top of the gPhoto 2 library.

Such graphical applications include the GNOME desktop application
GnoCam, the GTK application gtKam, and the KDE desktop application
Kamera (http://www.thekompany.com/projects/gphoto). The GnoCam and
gtKam applications are part of the gPhoto 2 code-base, at least for
downloading purposes.

You can download daily CVS snapshots of the gPhoto source code, which
includes the gPhoto 2 library and the GnoCam and gtKam applications, at
http://n-dimensional.de/projects/digicam/software/snapshots. With
packages like gPhoto, your Linux system can indeed be the center of
your digital lifestyle.

ITworld