Digital camera for FreeBSD

[andrew clarke]

On Sun 2010-07-18 12:21:42 UTC-0400, Robert Ames (robertames at hotmail.com) wrote:

> If such a thing does exist, can someone recommend a simple point
> and shoot digital camera that you can connect to a FreeBSD machine
> via a USB cable and have access to the images via a (presumably
> MS-DOS based) filesystem?
> 
> Please CC me on responses as I'm not subscribed.  Thanks.

Any camera that can act as a USB "mass storage device" should
basically be plug-and-play in FreeBSD.  Once such a camera is switched
on it will behave essentially the same as a USB card reader, and you
can you mount the flash memory card using mount_msdos.  This web page
shows how:

http://www.freebsddiary.org/card-reader.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_mass-storage_device_class 

There are some cameras (eg. my Kodak C1013) that support Picture
Transfer Protocol (PTP) over USB, instead of acting as a mountable
mass storage device.  For PTP-only cameras you can use gPhoto
(graphics/gphoto2 in Ports) to copy the images and videos to your PC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Transfer_Protocol 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPhoto

I believe F-Spot (graphics/f-spot) also supports PTP cameras.

Another option (for both types of cameras) is of course to use a USB
card reader, removing the flash memory card from the camera each time
you want to access your images.  It's somewhat cumbersome to do this
each time, although it's good to have a card reader anyway in
emergencies when the camera's batteries have inevitably gone flat.

Good luck,

Regards
Andrew