Suggestions for digial camera

Forum: Multimedia
Topic: Suggestions for digial camera
started by: Judland

Posted by Judland on May 16 2005,01:25

I've been setting up a copy of DSL on a PII and am very pleased with the distro so far.

What would you suggest to use as a digital camera photo retriever?

I tried installing gphoto through synaptic, but it only seems to allow me to set up camera interfaces via COM ports. Mine is a USB camera.

I installed USBView and it recognizes my camera when it's plugged in. However, the only application I'm familiar with is Digikam. I'm not sure what to use on my DSL set up.

Posted by Guest on May 22 2005,18:10

DSL can autodetect most any usb storage devices. Your digital camera is actually just another usb storage device so you can use this general procedure for viewing your pictures.

First, make sure you are familiar with how you get the pictures using windows. Does it have to be turned on before connecting to usb? Do you need to do special things before windows can read its contents? The easiest way to check is to just plug your camera to your computer (with the camera turned on), and then check from windows explorer if a new hard disk or removable storage device was added. If yes, try to see its contents just by going in that new device icon.

Next, boot your computer using DSL (camera not connected). Open an XTerminal. At the prompt, type:

Code Sample

cat /etc/fstab | less

Use the up and down arrow keys to browse through it, and note down what things are on the list. Especially take note of items that look like "/dev/sda#", where # is any number from 0 to 9. Do not worry if there is none. Press "q" to quit.

Next, plug your camera to the usb port. Wait for about 15 to 30 seconds for the autodetection to complete, then run the "cat /etc/fstab | less" command again. You should see a new item on the list that looks like "/dev/sda#". Take note of that, because that is where you will find the contents of your camera. Quit by pressing "q".

Now, run the command "mount /mnt/sda#", using the proper value for #. This will mount the camera to the directory item "/mnt/sda#". At this point you should be able to see the contents of your camera in that folder, using xZGV for example.

Posted by dmizzel on May 23 2005,00:04

I have a digital camera with a removable compact flash card. I take out the compact flash card and put it into a usb compact flash card reader which I then plug into my pc. From dsl (as with almost any linux distro) I then access my photos as if they were on a usb pendrive (which it essentially is). I'm sure this would be the same for most removable flash type media.

As for an application, I haven't got in to that yet. I have used the konqueror web browser to create an image gallery for viewing all the photos. Then I usually burn a cd for backup (essentially digital negatives).

I think I will try the above method for recognizing my camera (which gtkam will not recognize or support).

Posted by cbagger01 on May 23 2005,03:22

The Rox File manager has a "thumbnail" mode and it is great for browsing of locations that contain image files.

xzgv is a nice builtin application that also supports this ability.