Command Line Software to shoot photos

[Dave]

Does anybody know a command line tool to remotely shoot photos with a digital camera (which one doesn't matter) and store them on the local computer (windows system).
I'm programming a software for face detection to print Student IDs for our university. The people will sit down, shot the photo, the face will be detected and correctly cropped and the Student ID will be printed. Everything with one mouse click.

In fact I'm already finished... The problem is just the thing with the remote shooting.

thanks a lot
Dave

[KyleSTL]

EOS Utility.  Hook it us via USB cable and shoot from the computer.  The files are transferred directly to the computer's harddrive when they are taken.  Unless you're talking about wireless shooting, and in that case maybe this article could help:

http://www.jamiecarl.com.au/blog/wireless-tethering-the-coolest-oxymoron-ever/
http://www.jamiecarl.com.au/blog/wireless-tethering-the-next-level/

Or PeteTek's articles:
http://petetek.blogspot.com/2009/05/50-wireless-tethering-solution.html

[BK]

Both Canon and Nikon provide SDKs to remotely control their cameras. I haven't used either, but briefly looked at Canon's description. It looks like they provide C libraries that can be used in Microsoft's development environments on Windows or XCode on the Mac.

Again, I haven't used these, but if you are using Java instead of a variation of C you could probably tie these into your software directly using JNI.

If you aren't using one of these platforms to develop your software then it's very likely that you could use the libraries provided to develop your own command line utilities.

I just googled "Canon camera SDK" and the first link that came up got me to Canon's SDK site.

Good luck.

[Dave]

EOS Utility

Didn't know that there's a command line version... I haven't found it.

Canon camera SDK

It is a web application in PHP and it's to much effort to get into the SDK (I won't get payed for it). Thought there was a simple solution. I just need to take a photo. No settings etc. just shooting with the settings of the camera. But I googled the whole day and it seems that there is nothing like that...

thanks anyway

[Orangutan]

Though I have no personal experience with it, you might look at gphoto2 under CygWin.

http://cygwin-ports.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=cygwin-ports/gphoto2;a=summary

[PeterJ]

The Canon SDK comes with examples in VB and C++ and has a wrapper for C#, if you're familiar with any of those what your'e trying to do will only be half a dozen lines of code and I got that far within a few hours of getting the SDK. I was having a play around with movement detection using live view mode. I got it working OK but unfortunately the general technique was a a bit slow to be of much practical use.

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Most of the utilities make use of the Canon SDK, you need a driver to communicate with the camera.

Breeze Systems is something to look at, I use DSLR Remote pro.  They have a photobooth application that sounds ideal for taking a photo and automatically printing out a photo.

Ask Chris Breeze, but I believe that some of his software will operate from a command line.

http://breezesys.com/index.htm