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: