csant/log

I got myself finally a camera: the Canon PowerShot A610. It seems to come close to what I have been looking for in a camera, including macro photography, automatic but also manual settings, small size and lightweight, good quality, and, last but not least - being able to use it under Linux.

The camera is not to be mounted as a USB mass storage device, but supports Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) to transfer the files. I was very pleased to see Canon just support the standard, without any proprietary extensions - there is some ptp software available: the easiest was to install gphoto2 and then simply

$ gphoto2 --get-all-files

to retrieve all pictures from the camera. Actually, the A610 is not recognized in the gphoto2 2.1.6 release yet - only the 2.1.99 version lists the camera, but that is about everything that is needed to officially support it. Currently it autodetects the camera as

$ gphoto2 --auto-detect
Model                          Port                                            
----------------------------------------------------------
USB PTP Class Camera           usb:            
USB PTP Class Camera           usb:004,004

and can talk with it without any further trouble.

Yay for standards!

Update

Just updated libgphoto2 to the latest 2.1.99 release:

$ gphoto2 --auto-detect
Model                          Port                                            
----------------------------------------------------------
Canon PowerShot A610 (normal mode) usb:            
Canon PowerShot A610 (normal mode) usb:004,005

Update 2

After my initial rejoice, I had some trouble with the latest libgphoto2 2.1.99 release - as in, it would refuse to communicate with the camera, with the error message

Camera not operational

Have found at least one more thread about this issue, but no solution to the problem yet.

Luckyly gphoto2 isn't the only PTP software out there, and the much simpler ptpcam included in the libptp2 package solved my problem.

After all, having different software for one and the same task isn't that bad at times…

Update 3

I got gphoto2 to work nicely again, with a little workaround.

The new libgphoto2 library seems to misdetect the camera: it is not to be treated as "Canon PowerShot A610 (normal mode)" (see above), but as "Canon PowerShot A610 (PTP mode)".

$ gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A610 (PTP mode)" --list-files

produces the expected listing. But then, when trying to

$ gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A610 (PTP mode)" --get-all-files

gphoto2 drops out with

$ gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A610 (PTP mode)" --get-all-files
Downloading 'IMG_0072.JPG' from folder '/store_00010001/DCIM/100CANON'...      
gphoto2: symbol lookup error: gphoto2: undefined symbol: GP_SYSTEM_IS_FILE

Hmmmm, did they change something in the API? A first quick search finds

if ((p.flags & FLAGS_QUIET) == 0) {
 while ((p.flags & FLAGS_FORCE_OVERWRITE) == 0 &&
  GP_SYSTEM_IS_FILE (s)) {
    do {
      putchar ('\007');
      printf (_("File %s exists. Overwrite? [y|n] "),
        s);
      fflush (stdout);

in gphoto2's main.c - and indeed

gphoto2 --quiet --camera "Canon PowerShot A610 (PTP mode)" --get-all-files

downloads all files with no further trouble.

Update 4 - and hopefully last one!

Right, you have to love small changes - they *did* "change" API.

libgphoto2 2.1.6 defined in camlibs/directory/directory.c

GP_SYSTEM_IS_FILE

and the new 2.1.99 has, in the same file

gp_system_is_file

but I couldn't find this mentioned in any Changelog (have I missed something?). which is part of some keep namespace clear: rename GP_SYSTEM_* to gp_system_* cleanup.

$ cd gphoto2-2.1.6
$ make clean
$ $EDITOR gphoto2/main.c

change the one occurence of "GP_SYSTEM_IS_FILE" to "gp_system_is_file",

$ make
$ make install
$ gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A610 (PTP mode)" --get-all-files

or be more sensible and do not mix gphoto2 2.1.6 with libgphoto2 2.1.99 libraries…

Amen.