Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

One of the things I had not previously done with a Linux desktop was connect it to my digital camera and transfer images. Since my camera came with software for Windows (and a Twain driver that works with Photoshop) I just never really tried, until recently, I simply used to always use a Windows machine with the camera.

Well that changed last week when I needed to use the camera and did not have a working Windows machine around. I figured I would be able to find some command line something or other to at least transfer the pictures from the camera to a Linux machine using a serial connection. I started meticulous research on the matter (uh, that means I searched Freshmeat and SourceForge).

One of the first things I came across was gPhoto. The project looked very mature, stable and was popular so I figured I would give it a try. The first thing I tried was simply going to the command line and typing "gphoto". Viola, window pops up, and I have GUI digital camera software in Linux. (It must be included with RedHat 7.x, I did not ever install it but I was using RedHat and it was there, sometimes that aggravates me, but in this case it worked out. If you dont have it already the sources are available at the site and you can catch it on rpmfind.net as well).

So now that I have the software I figure its gonna be tricky to set this thing up and have it work well with my camera. I have an older Kodak DC210 camera (by todays standards its lame, but in its day it was OK). I am pleasantly surprised to see that gPhoto is well designed, layout is great, I browse through the setup and it has a TON of cameras (in fact over 300) including mine already listed, it recommends the correct port for the setup and BAM thumbnails from the camera appear. Then I go on to use gPhoto and it transfers the images MUCH FASTER than any of my past Windows software! (this is probably due to a setting I did not have correct, but I was always using the serial port at its max?) gPhoto is totally awesome, its MUCH better than the Kodak crap that came with my camera and its faster than using a twain driver in another app. I simply use it for thumbnails and then transfer, it may be able to do more stuff that I am not aware of but the transfer is really all I need.

Of course once the pictures are transferred its off to GIMP for touching up and optimizing, and then its a done deal. gPhoto combined with GIMP makes a totally incredible digital camera setup on Linux.

Everyone else probably already knows about gPhoto and this is nothing new (maybe its just me that had never even heard of this before) but just in case you havent you should really check it out.