LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera"

You forgot Camera.app

tarzeau — 2005-03-28T13:09:11+00:00

It's really great, you should try it.

You can find it here: Camera.app homepage

Or even try it on this live CD: GNUstep Live CD

PTP is not an older way of talking to cameras

ekuns — 2005-03-02T16:49:24+00:00

The camera can also be instructed to use the "picture transport protocol" (PTP) mode, which is an older, specialized way of talking to cameras.

The PTP protocol is newer than the USB mass storage protocol, and is a protocol specifically designed for imaging devices. If all you ever want to do is download images and delete images, then mass storage is fine. However, if you want to automate various camera features using your computer, then the PTP protocol is a non-proprietary standard that allows far more functionality than just downloading and deleting images. Using PTP, you can tell the camera to take photos, change camera settings, and so on.

Other than this, it's a good article.

48-bit

gvy — 2005-02-27T17:27:38+00:00

There _were_ at least two such software packages.

nip may be one of them, I don't remember the name of the second -- you could try too google up message in news://fido7.ru.linux ("Alex Korchmar nip") -- he was asking this and got a few surprising answers last autumn or even winter.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

patman — 2005-02-25T23:54:31+00:00

I like using the command line, and could not find any support for that with kimdaba.

i.e. tag a photo with certain properties via command line and not via the gui.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

patman — 2005-02-25T23:48:19+00:00

If your camera supports capture via gphoto2 and libgphoto2, you can just use:

gphoto2 -I 30

And take a picture every 30 seconds.

Thumbnail speed

grouch — 2005-02-25T20:56:59+00:00

"But Nautilus and GThumb are so darn slow that it can make a grown man (me) cry: Opening a folder with, say, 100 images can take minutes (!) om my 1GHz machine before all image thumbnails are loaded."

cd thumbnails/
qiv *.jpg

mogrify

grouch — 2005-02-25T20:20:04+00:00

"Incidentally, I use flphoto to sort through pictures -- mainly just to turn them upright. One of its unusual merits is that it can losslessly rotate the pictures. That is, instead of reading and decompressing a jpeg, rotating it, and then re-encoding a new jpeg, it operates on the compressed jpeg data directly. Oddly, flphoto isn't in the Debian repository, so it's one of very few programs on my systems that I had to build myself."

apt-get install imagemagick

You can then use mogrify to rotate your images, for example:

mogrify -compress lossless -rotate +90 myphoto.jpg

some links that may help

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

smurf — 2005-02-20T13:21:20+00:00

dcraw is a somewhat basic tool. Use ufraw.

http://www.aei.mpg.de/~udif/UFRaw/

(I'm the Debian maintainer.)

Re: Image management tools

ayeomans — 2005-02-19T20:28:13+00:00

I agree there is risk of bloat if all these functions go into one tool.

One reason I'd love to see a checklist is to see which tools complement each other well, and which overlap so much that one is redundant.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

roelofs — 2005-02-18T21:37:46+00:00

But unfortunately there is no linux programm to handle these 48bit tiffs.

What kind of handling do you need? The old version of NETPBM handled 16bps images in text mode just fine (and could be compiled to do some level of binary-mode support, IIRC); I'd be surprised if the new version has lost that capability. Of course, you'd have to handle EXIF stuff separately, and it can take some experimentation to get the right set of commands piped together, but it always seemed to work pretty well for me. Can't say that I've done any 16bps work in recent years, though.

Greg

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

stevan — 2005-02-17T10:34:43+00:00

Regarding management if images, you may want to look at kimdaba. It
allows you to add a certain amount of metadata to your collection, and to
search on those fields. It could be viewed (pardon...) as being a little
limited, but for managing home collections seems a good addition.

S

I prefer USB Mass Storage support

TheOneKEA — 2005-02-16T14:05:35+00:00

I don't like using special UIs to get at my photos. My FujiFilm A340 has excellent USB Mass Storage support and works great with the Linux EHCI drivers. Plug it in, wait a few seconds, mount it, copy&move&edit, etc.

UIs like these have their place, but IMO treating it like a disk partition and accessing it via the filesystem context seems more intuitive.

Thumbnail speed

eskild — 2005-02-16T13:19:12+00:00

I take a good deal of photos; it's not uncommon for me to return home after some sort of event with several hundred pictures. Since my camera only has USB 1.1, I use the removable CF card for transfer to the computer; I typically transfer the entire contents of the CF and then browse the images on the harddrive.

But Nautilus and GThumb are so darn slow that it can make a grown man (me) cry: Opening a folder with, say, 100 images can take minutes (!) om my 1GHz machine before all image thumbnails are loaded. That's just not good enough; virtually all "decent" image viewers on Windows beat the living s* out of their Linux equivalents: Opening the same folder takes seconds.

Yes, I do realize that if I edit the image and use an app smart enough to leave the thumbnail alone, but dumb enough to not update it, then there's a mismatch between thumbnail and image. Well, then that's a bug in the app generating the revised image file, and we need to help the author fix it.

So: If there's a thumbnail in a file, *use it*! And I don't care if it's of less resolution than Nautilus/GThumb/whatever deems appropriate. The user experience is king, and for someone like me speed is more important than quality (for thumbnails, not images, of course).

Regards,

/eskild.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

pauly — 2005-02-16T08:10:57+00:00

ok, I think I've got the point now. And sorry for mixing up Canon and Adobe.
Regards, Martin

HAL

lakeland — 2005-02-16T03:28:30+00:00

The problems you had with digikam are all solved by using HAL.

Actually, I've been really impressed with HAL, I have a KVM switch which
causes my mouse to disappear (apparently windows has a bug which causes it
to stuff up if the mouse is removed, and the KVM switch works around this
in such a way as to confuse linux and require it to create a new mouse on
switch). At least, that's what I think happens, but I digress... With
HAL, the process is totally transparent -- I didn't even realise it was
happening until I booted an older debian install without HAL enabled and
it didn't work.

The day that HAL is installed and running by default on all major distros
will be a good day.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

trutkin — 2005-02-15T21:00:12+00:00

I had a very good experience with gthumb as well with my USB camera (Nikon 3200).

card reader dangers

gutschke — 2005-02-15T20:42:14+00:00

If your camera has an orientation sensor, then you can use "jhead" with the "-autorot" option to automatically rotate pictures that need rotating.

I usually do all my image processing through one big fully automated shell script. This takes care of most of what I need to do. And only a small select number of pictures ever need manual post processing.

Image management tools

skellba — 2005-02-15T20:32:22+00:00

Irfanviewer is usable under WINE and works quite well and has all tools for organizing pictures. And it can rotate jpg lossless. Speed under WINE is very acceptable (even with an old 500MHz Pentium).

Stefan Kell

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

skellba — 2005-02-15T20:28:55+00:00

regarding raw: look at "http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/" I use dcraw for my Canon Powerhot G2 and it works very well. But sometimes you need some tweaking to get the colors right (white correction). Especially useful is the 16bit option for difficult pictures. But unfortunately there is no linux programm to handle these 48bit tiffs.

Regards

Stefan Kell

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

jamesh — 2005-02-15T19:18:12+00:00

Being able to access raw image data is really a camera issue rather than Linux software issue, since most cameras don't save raw image files. If your camera is storing raw image files, you should be able to copy them off as easily as jpeg files.

To display the raw images, you can use the dcraw tool (or a program embedding it, such as the gimp plugin you are probably thinking of).

As for DNG, it is an Adobe spec and its adoption is probably still a way off (if it is adopted at all).

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

pauly — 2005-02-15T18:24:25+00:00

What about access to the raw picture data?
The more ambitious camera people keep fussing about this,
but most of them seem to use some special plugin for Photoshop
GIMP or whatever. Is DNG (by Canon) going to become
a _standard_, and are generic tools (e.g. raw files as mass storage)
available?

Cheers, Martin

card reader dangers

dhess — 2005-02-15T18:12:57+00:00

Incidentally, I use flphoto to sort through pictures -- mainly just to turn them upright. One of its unusual merits is that it can losslessly rotate the pictures. That is, instead of reading and decompressing a jpeg, rotating it, and then re-encoding a new jpeg, it operates on the compressed jpeg data directly.

Maybe you already knew this, but jpegtran also does lossless rotation, and it's available in Debian's libjpeg-progs. In fact, all of jpegtran's image processing is performed on the DCT blocks.

Re: Image management tools

mrshiny — 2005-02-15T15:51:32+00:00

The thing is, photo management is a special kind of file management. It IS a hybrid of file management and photo editing. I spent a few hours yesterday sorting, rotating, cropping, resizing, and renaming photos, and I've come to the conclusion that a special tool is needed. Gimp is too generic; konqueror by itself is not enough. Some kind of in- between is needed.

I'd like to see a good add-on to Gimp that lets you open a bunch of files from the camera (or disk), rename the files according to some template (my photos are named 'YYYYMMDD-HHmm description.jpg'), rotate, crop, resize, adjust brightness/contrast/colors, save the "finished" image to one directory and the original to a backup directory (I keep all originals: these are like 'negatives': you don't crop the negative, you crop the photo). This process could be greatly automated but it's not generic functionality that belongs in EITHER Gimp nor Konqueror (or whatever file manager you use). So, yes, a special photo management app seems like a good idea. Ideally, it would re-use code from other apps, but it would still be a separate app.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

mrshiny — 2005-02-15T15:35:34+00:00

My Sony Camera, which is from 2000, supports only mass-storage. I'm actually surprised that there are other Sonys that don't support mass-storage.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

kleptog — 2005-02-15T13:36:40+00:00

Wow, the concept of using a program to extract photos from a camera seems a little old fashioned to me. I plug mine in the USB port and use "cp -a" to copy the files off.

I then use bins-edit-gui to give each image a description and orientation and then have a Makefile run bins to generate all the thumbnails and directories, HTML pages, EXIF extraction and more. Yes, it's lossless rotation.

The only problem is that once you have a few thousand photos it can take a while to process, but you can eat dinner in the meantime.

Re: Image management tools

cantsin — 2005-02-15T12:55:54+00:00

You wrote:

Thumbnail + filmstrip preview of images
Image rename based on pattern/date/time/etc
Lossless rotation by 90/180/270 degrees - including the thumbnail image in a JPEG
[...]

No offense intended, but this points out for me why GUI applications get so bloated, try to do everything in one place and one app. All the functionality you describe can be easily had and is more elegantly available via the commandline toolchain of gphoto2, mmv, convert and some shell scripting syntax. [It would be nice if there existed GUIs which allowed users the same degree of chaining together small tools.] If a photo managing application would implement all the functions you propose, it would become a redundant hybrid of The Gimp and a graphical filemanager like konqueror or nautilus.

Florian

Image management tools

ayeomans — 2005-02-15T10:17:24+00:00

As a suggestion for your future review, could you add a check-list of some basic functions, such as:-

Thumbnail + filmstrip preview of images
Image rename based on pattern/date/time/etc
Lossless rotation by 90/180/270 degrees - including the thumbnail image in a JPEG
Lossless cropping of JPEGs
Preservation, display and editing of EXIF information
Good printing facilities, including
..standard-size templates for US and Europe paper sizes
..templates to include mixed sizes to maximise paper use
..ability to select variable numbers of different photos
..ability to arbitrarily size and position pictures on paper
Save as web page option, with thumbnails
Image correction facilities, including
..rotation and cropping
..colour correction
..red-eye removal

Including the better Windows tools such as Picasa and Irfanview in the comparison would be informative!

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

carlos — 2005-02-15T10:00:42+00:00

"then your editor put the camera into the PTP mode, and after tweaking
some permissions under /proc/bus/usb, gtkam was able to detect it"

Could you elaborate on these permissions issue, please?
This weekend I tried to use a Sony DSC-V1 (PTP mode),
after installing the new libgphoto2 2.1.5, and gphoto2 2.1.5,

digikam happily lists the camera, but them gives
a "invalid parameter error". gphoto2 also gives an error
"io error: invalid parameter"

This looks as it could be related with wrong permissions...

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

johill — 2005-02-15T08:46:33+00:00

Take a look at zenity then -- it provides you with a way to display a gtk2 progress bar gui from the command line or a script.

Digikam download dialog does more than that

hippy — 2005-02-15T08:14:21+00:00

Digikam's download dialog has some nice features that you do not mention.

It can automatically rename photo files as it downloads them. The names
can be based on a simple pattern and/or contain the date and time that the
photo was taken. This can be very useful for avoiding duplicate file names
when the camera reuses a name.

The dialog also provide access to the full image and to any EXIF data that
the camera records.

In addition, if the camera records orientation information in the image,
the image can be automatically rotated as it is downloaded.

I look forward to your full review of image management applications in the
near future. I hope that you manage to build an up to date version of
digikam for the review, as more image editing features have been appearing
in the CVS version in resent weeks.

Regards

Richard

one more thing

ncm — 2005-02-15T08:02:16+00:00

I have just tried gthumb 2.6.3, and am now ready to abandon flphoto.

card reader dangers

ncm — 2005-02-15T06:21:49+00:00

I used to unplug the SmartMedia memory module from my camera and plug it into a PCMCIA card. It was fine until the PCMCIA card started destroying memory modules. Now I use only USB, and never remove the card from the camera.

Incidentally, I use flphoto to sort through pictures -- mainly just to turn them upright. One of its unusual merits is that it can losslessly rotate the pictures. That is, instead of reading and decompressing a jpeg, rotating it, and then re-encoding a new jpeg, it operates on the compressed jpeg data directly. Oddly, flphoto isn't in the Debian repository, so it's one of very few programs on my systems that I had to build myself.

Of course I never tried to get flphoto to work the camera itself. Rather, relying on an automount entry with a two-second timeout, I plug in the camera, "cp -p /camera/*" to an appropriate directory (usually named, e.g., 20050215), wait just a moment, and unplug.

Here's the line in /etc/auto.rmv:

camera -fstype=vfat,ro,noatime,user,dmask=0 :/dev/sda1

and in /etc/auto.master:

/rmv /etc/auto.rmv --timeout=2

(Note that the syntax for the last bit changed between releases of the automount daemons, without notice). Of course I have a convenient symbolic link from /camera to /rmv/camera/dcim/100olymp, which is how my Olympus presents its files once mounted.

It didn't take all day to set this up, but I did waste a half hour on discovering that "--timeout 2" had stopped working, and what to do instead. Otherwise, the whole project took 15 minutes. It took a lot longer to figure out that all the GUI programs I could apt-get (at the time) were useless. I wonder if a hotplug mount script would be cleaner than relying on the buggy autofs driver.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

joey — 2005-02-15T04:38:39+00:00

Agreed; I've set up family's machines so then they can go manage the pics using nautilus.hey plug in the camera, get an indicator when the command line app is done transferring them to an appropriatly tiemstamped directory, and
then they can go manage the pics using nautilus. This turned out to be much easier to teach than yet another (and IIRC sometimes unstable) GUI application. Only way to improve on it really would be a graphical progress indicator.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

Thalience — 2005-02-15T01:04:45+00:00

He mentions that it does support the USB mass storage device standard. As such, I'm baffled that he insisted on useing the PTP mode.

In my view, gphoto2 and friends are best treated as a fallback solution for cruddy cameras that don't support mass storage device access.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

SiB — 2005-02-14T23:47:10+00:00

"There should be no need for separate, specialized applications to interface with a digital camera."

What I'd like to do with my camera is to hook it up to the USB port and have the computer take pictures in regular intervals. Or my son should not need to run around the scene for each picture in his lego movies, but can just hit a key on the laptop or something, after adjusting lego actor's move.

My camera does support PTP, but it does not allow the computer to take pictures :-(

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

cantsin — 2005-02-14T22:56:57+00:00

The article could also mention that

all libgphoto2 functionality can be accessed via the commandline tool "gphoto2". In many cases, using "gphoto2 --get-all-files" or a custom script (which can, for example, do automatic corrections on images via ImageMagick/convert) is more efficient than using one of the GUI tools built on top of libgphoto2
for graphical management of photos on a camera, existing GUI file managers like konqueror, nautilus and rox often are superior. All of them offer inline preview of images and can of course access cameras that speak the USB mass storage protocol; konqueror in addition can talk to libgphoto2 devices via the "camera://" URI.

-F

flphoto

jabby — 2005-02-14T22:08:38+00:00

I use Mandrake at home and flphoto is what I use to browse, download and delete images (and movies) on my Canon PowerShot S400. You just put the camera in review mode and turn it on and hotplug detects it, puts a nifty little 'flphoto' icon on the desktop, and launches flphoto. Then I hit Ctrl-C (unintuitive, I know) to bring up the "(Import from) Camera" dialog. It automatically finds my camera and starts displaying all of the available files in a horizontal viewer. I then browse to a download folder (or create one), and click download.

The interface has a Mac OS X / Aqua look to it, complete with a pleasing progress bar as each file is transferred. It automatically creates thumbnails in a hidden subfolder. It contains some features for browsing the downloaded files at full resolution.

I find it quite adequate. As someone who prefers the fastest, lightest program for the task, one that does not require KDE or GNOME libraries is perfect. It also means that I can recommend it to people with older, slower systems.

Jason

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

kay — 2005-02-14T21:29:42+00:00

my first impression was "Oh no, he buy a Sony camera!" because of the lack of a USB mass storage emulation in the past. you had to install windows only drivers to acces the sony only memory stick inside the camera or buy a card reader.

I'm glad to hear that sony supports USB mass storage now, but I refuse to buy Sony products until they support not only their own standards.

Kay

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

jwb — 2005-02-14T21:23:03+00:00

I find this is the best way. I just pop the CF out of my Canon and into the front-mounted reader on my Shuttle machine. It's so much easier than using a camera-specific interface, and Nautilus provides a nice preview function so I quickly pick the photos to copy.

The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

jsbarnes — 2005-02-14T20:35:42+00:00

I've been pretty happy browsing my camera contents with Konqueror under
KDE. It's pretty easy to configure new cameras under the KDE control
center, assuming your camera is listed. Once that's done, you can just
use camera:/ in the Location bar of Konqueror to get at everything.