16.7. Connection to Digital Camera

AFAIK there are currently three methods to connect a digital camera to a laptop: the infrared port (IrDA®), serial port and maybe USB. There are also some auxiliary programs for conversion of pictures, etc.

Eric <dago_AT_tkg.att.ne.jp> wrote: "I finally succeeded in downloading pictures from my digital camera, but not exactly the way I expected, i.e. not through USB port but using PCMCIA card port and memory stick device, part of digital camera hardware. Anyway, some interesting things to mention:

Sony (pretending using a standard) uses the msdos format to store images as JPEG files ; so the best way to have your OS recognizing them is to mount the raw device like a msdos filesystem; using mount directly doesn't work (don't know why) but an entry in the /etc/fstab file allows you to mount the device correctly. i.e.:

/dev/hde1 /mnt/camera msdos user,noauto,ro 0 0

Of course, newfs before mount works too, but there is nothing to see at all ;-) I think both noauto and ro are important flags; I tried without it and it didn't work. Somehow the mount I got seems buggy . And if ro is missing, the camera doesn't recognize back the memory stick and it needs to be msdos-formatted.

Appropriate to the camera documentation , both PCMCIA and USB port behave the same (for Mac and Windoze - i.e. you see a file system auto mounted) - I deduce for Linux it should be the same thing too, as long as the USB driver is installed. I think now that mounting USB raw device the way I did with PCMCIA should work, but I still couldn't find which device to use."

OpenDiS (Open Digita Support) is a library and utility program for cameras such as the Kodak DC-220, DC-260, DC-265, and DC-280, that run Flashpoint's Digita operating system. The library is a unix implementation of the Digita Host Interface Specification, intended for embedding Digita support in other products such as gPhoto. The utility is a simple command-line program for standalone downloading of photos from the cameras.

gPhoto enables you to take a photo from any digital camera, load it onto your PC running a free operating system like GNU/Linux, print it, email it, put it on your web site, save it on your storage media in popular graphics formats or just view it on your monitor. gPhoto sports a new HTML engine that allows the creation of gallery themes (HTML templates with special tags) making publishing images to the world wide web a snap. A directory browse mode is implemented making it easy to create an HTML gallery from images already on your computer. Support for the Canon PowerShot A50, Kodak DC-240/280 USB, and Mustek MDC-800 digital cameras.

photopc is a library and a command-line frontend to manipulate digital still cameras based on Fujitsu chipset and Siarra Imaging firmware. The program is known to work with Agfa, Epson and Olympus cameras. Should also work with Sanyo, but this is untested. The cameras typically come with software for Windows and for Mac, and no description of the protocol. With this tool, they are manageable from a UNIX box. Bruce D. Lightner <lightner_AT_metaflow.com> has added support for Win32 and DOS platforms. Note that the program does not have any GUI, it is plain command-line even on Windows. For a GUI, check out the phototk program.

kdc2tiff is software to convert .kdc images from Kodak's DC120 digital camera to .tiff or .jpg files. This software pays particular attention to aspect ratio, high quality scaling, contrast adjustment, gamma correction, and image rotation.

rdc2e is a command line tool that downloads images from a Ricoh RDC-2E digital camera. It is available as either a source tar ball or a RedHat 6.1 i386 RPM.

fujiplay Interface for Fuji digital cameras.