Digital Cameras, Linux, and BSD

Attach the camera to the USB port, verify that it's seen

lsusb should display a line showing that it's there:

% lsusb
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 046d:c404 Logitech, Inc. TrackMan Wheel
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 051d:0002 American Power Conversion Uninterruptible Power Supply
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 006: ID 04cb:01d2 Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 05e3:0760 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB 2.0 Card Reader/Writer
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 045e:00db Microsoft Corp. Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 V1.0
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 03f0:5511 Hewlett-Packard
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 

usbview provides a detailed graphical user interface for examining USB devices.

Use the device

There are two entirely different methods of data storage on digital cameras:

• USB Mass Storage Device
• Picture Transfer Protocol, or PTP

If your camera behaves as a mass storage device, it will appear as a SCSI disk. Mount it with something like the following:

% mount /dev/sda1 /media/camera 

How can you tell that it is device /dev/sda1, the first partition of the first SCSI device? If you can't just guess that, ask for your partition tables as root:

# fdisk -l 

How can you allow an ordinary user to mount removeable file systems? Specify this in /etc/fstab:

% grep media /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1  /media/camera  auto  user  0  0

If, on the other hand, your camera uses PTP, as seems more common on newer cameras, use some user-space tools.

The Konqueror browser, part of the KDE desktop, understands PTP. Just bring up a Konqueror browser and change the location to camera:/

That should let you browse the camera's storage. The URL ends up being something like this:
camera://USB%20PTP%20Class%20Camera@[usb:004,006]/store_10000001/DCIM/101_FUJI
Of course, that 004,006, indicating USB bus #4 and device #6, will depend on where you attach your camera. See the lsusb output above for how you can figure out in advance what this will be.

However, Konqueror will give give you icons to click on:
USB PTP Class Camera, then
store_10000001, then
DCIM, then
101_FUJI (or however your camera identifies itself).

To download the pictures from the command line, simply use:

% cd /path/to/desired/storage/area
gphoto2 -P 

See the gphoto2 manual page for far more.

Here is my page on digital camera repair....

© Bob Cromwell Oct 2008. Created with /bin/vi and ImageMagick, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache.    Root password available here