5 Hello and welcome to the wonderful world of gphoto! This is libgphoto2, the
6 successor of gphoto with lots of new features and additional camera
9 If you miss a feature, would like to report success or failure, or have any
10 questions, please don't hesitate to contact our mailing list.
17 libgphoto2 is a library that can be used by applications to access various
20 For more information on gphoto, see
24 There, you can also get information on mailing lists, supported cameras,
25 and availability of gphoto2. Another source of information is
29 where you can access our SVN server to fetch the source code of
30 gphoto2, gtkam and GnoCam (see below).
34 What is libgphoto2 not?
35 -----------------------
37 libgphoto2 itself is not a GUI application, opposed to gphoto. There are
38 GUI frontends for the gphoto2 library, however, such as gtkam for
41 libgphoto2 can only talk to cameras the language of those it understands.
42 That is, if you own a camera that speaks a language that isn't published
43 anywhere and nobody has been able to figure out the meaning of the sentences,
44 libgphoto2 cannot communicate with those cameras.
46 Then, there are cameras supporting the so-called USB Mass Storage protocol.
47 This is a protocol that has been published and lets you access any storage
48 device, be it a camera or a disk connected via USB to your computer. As there
49 are already drivers for this protocol out there, you don't need an additional
50 library like libgphoto2. The list of camera that use USB Mass Storage is getting
51 longer everyday, so we won't publish it.
53 For a more up to date list, you can consult
57 Your operating system will tell you about that because it is likely to recognise
58 the device as a SCSI disk that you can mount (for Linux 'dmesg' will tell you).
59 Again, those cameras *cannot* be accessed through libgphoto2. Some of them can
60 be switched to use a different communication protocol and might be in that case
61 useable with libgphoto2.
63 Other camera support a protocol called PTP or USB Imaging Devices that has
64 been developped by Kodak and other. libgphoto2 does support PTP. Also working
65 will be cameras labeled as "PictBridge", which is a extension to PTP.
67 Here is a short incomplete list of camera that use this protocol:
69 * Canon PowerShot, IXUS and EOS series
70 * Nikon Coolpix and DSC series
71 * HP PhotoSmart (all from the last 5+ years)
72 * Kodak DC-4800, DX-3215, DX-3500, DX-3600, DX-3700, DX-3900, MC3 and all the
73 camera that use Kodak Easy Share(tm) system.
74 * Sony DSC-P5, DSC-F707, DSC-P30, DSC-P50, DSC-S75, DSC-S85, MVC-CD300
75 (all need user configuration of the camera)
78 A PTP camera unknown to libgphoto2 will be detected as a generic PTP camera and
79 will work as-is without any changes.
80 MTP (Microsoft Transfer Protocol) players will also be accessible,
81 since MTP is based on PTP.
87 libgphoto2 should compile and run on pretty much all Unix-like platforms.
88 libgphoto2 has _not_ (yet?) been ported to any operating system from MicroSoft.
92 How to set up libgphoto2
93 ------------------------
95 For information on how to set up libgphoto2 and its frontends, see
98 It is available at the following places:
100 - At the gphoto website: @URL_GPHOTO_HOME@
102 - In the SVN module gphoto2-manual
104 The gPhoto2 Manual includes information about setting up USB
107 If you run into problems, you may also consult the FAQ (also included
108 in The gPhoto2 Manual).
115 gphoto2 is a command line frontend which is quite powerful,
116 especially in combination with scripts. See The gPhoto2 Manual
117 for a short description.
119 For the GUI lovers, there are for example digikam (KDE), gthumb (GNOME),
120 f-spot (GNOME / Mono) and more. We also have a GTK2 reference GUI
121 called gtkam, which is unmaintained, its only special features are
123 Additionally, there are plugins for other programs available like
124 kio_camera (KDE - Konqueror) and a fuse plugin, gphotofs.
131 Every piece of software contains errors and flaws. So does
132 libgphoto2. When you encounter something that does not work, please do
135 1. Find out whether this is a known problem.
137 2. Reproduce the problem with debug output enabled and the language
138 set to English, so that the development team will understand the
139 messages. You can do this by running:
143 if you're using the gtkam frontend or running:
145 env LC_ALL=C gphoto2 --debug-logfile=logfile.log --debug <options>
147 using the gphoto2 command line interface.
149 3. Report the problem on the mailing list with the corresponding debug
150 output if it is small. If it is more than a few kilobytes, please
151 don't post the complete debug output on the list.