Camera Buddy - announcement and feedback

Applications
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This is announcement of new application in the Harbour - Camera Buddy

When going to the trip, I take my DSLR camera with me sometimes. It produces significantly better output than embedded cameras in my phone, that I always have in the pocket. But when I want to share some moment with others, I had no other choice than take a picture with the phone or share the photo when returning from the trip. And in such moment, idea for the new application comes to my mind. As I verified during development of TimeLapse tools , it is possible to use gphoto library to connect to the external camera from the phone with SailfishOS. So, it should be simple write an app that is able to list photos in camera’s storage and download them to the phone’s storage.

Idea for this application was in my mind for years. But now, as vibe-coding become our day to day reality, I created it finally. It was done with assistance of Github Copilot in 20 hours of vibe-coding, programming and debugging…

Lets try it, share your ideas, send patches, issues…

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We are using AI companions in my work to develop production code. It is todays reality. I believe that all programmers shlould know limits of the AI and the tasks where it excel… But I do not want to discuss vibe-coding in this thread. I will probably share my SFOS specific experience in the separate post.

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Nice idea! Time to find my DSLR. How does it work? Direct connection via USB?

5

Yes. You just need to have USB OTG dongle, to make phone able to act as USB host. Or use WiFi connection (my Nikon D7500 act as a hotspot). I verified that with Xperia 10.II and Nikon camera. List of supported cameras is on Gphoto page here.

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Works like a charm with Nikon D5300 :heart: via wifi
Thanks so much!
It would be nice to be able to create new directories just before downloading files.
-updated

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7

Can you add support for Toshiba Flashair-SD-Cards?
Its basicly a SD-Card which has an inbuild WLAN-Hotspot/Tiny Webserver. I use it in my small Canon EOS 100d, because it lacks the original WLAN-Module.

Until today, i use my small shellscript which download all pictures with:

source_dir="DCIM/100CANON" dest_dir="home/defaultuser/Pictures/FlashAir"

…

get content-list

curl -o dir.txt “http://flashair/command.cgi?op=100&DIR=/DCIM/100CANON”

…

download files

curl -o “/$dest_dir/$f2” “http://flashair/$source_dir/$f2”

Can you implement that too?

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Well, from fast search, gphoto library doesn’t support these cards. I do not want to write camera abstraction layer and use other libraries than gphoto. But it seems that Flashair cards supports standard WebDav protocol. Did you tried to use GhostCloud to browse files on the card?

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I am using standard Silica component FolderPickerDialog for directory selection. It doesn’t support creation of subdirectories :frowning: I am using File Browser to create target directory in advance. I know, it is not convenient.

edit: I can imagine to create another step - just before downloading show page with option to create new subdirectory and option howto behave when files exists already (override, skip, rename…) Download options · Issue #10 · Karry/harbour-camera-buddy · GitHub

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I have ezShare card with similar functionality. Perhaps we should write a separate app for those…

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Not exactly on topic but:

If it’s DAV, there is a (TUI) tool called cadaver on chum you can use to explore such shares.
And there’s rclone of course, and davfs2, both support mounting dav locations.

rclone also has a daemon/command mode and could serve as a backend for some GUI.

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With ChatGPT help I tried to make native GUI app for rclone in qml+python (pyotherside) some months ago… for now it shows list of remotes places (which are configured in the rclone.conf) and is able to list the / of remote places but then for some reason not the subdirectories.

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great effort, I was experimenting in the past with airnef lib, it seemed to work from the terminal but failed to provide a UI wrapper ;-(
I’ve tested CammeraBuddy with my camera and seems to work nicely. It would be nice to download a preview or a lower res jpg/png from a raw image?

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I am worry that resolution of the preview is unusable for something else than the preview. From my Nikon, it has resolution 160x120 pixels. And the gphoto library is not capable to tell the camera to do format conversion before downloading… Or is there some configuration that I am not aware of? So the only possible way I know is to download huge RAW and then use another tool to convert raw to the JPEG…

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160x120 is only good for a thumbnail size pic. Nikon’s wmu app seems to be able to download jpeg 1620x1080 directly from the camera’s raw image, but I do not know how it does it. I checked airnef and cannot do that either, there is an option for:

–action {getfiles,getsmallthumbs,getlargethumbs,listfiles}

maybe something getlargethumbs can have slightly higher resolution?

One option that could work is if the camera stores pics in both RAW and basic resolution JPG, then Camera Buddy can download the JPG only? A 20+ MB raw image on the phone is not so practical?

gphoto2 has an option for preview (--get-preview for embedded preview image), not a full JPEG version, but might not be supported from all cameras.

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One option that could work is if the camera stores pics in both RAW and basic resolution JPG, then Camera Buddy can download the JPG only?

This is the option I’m using actually. I use just 1% of the RAW images, when I’m not satisfied with the default camera processing.

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I just found out that NEF file may embed huge JPEG file.

On the example below, 30 MiB raw file contains 1.9 MiB jpeg:

ls -alh DSC_8765.NEF 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 karry karry 28M Nov 14 17:28 DSC_8765.NEF

exiftool -b -JpgFromRaw DSC_8765.NEF > DSC_8765.jpg

ls -alh DSC_8765.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 karry karry 1.9M Nov 14 21:17 DSC_8765.jpg

file DSC_8765.jpg 
DSC_8765.jpg: JPEG image data, baseline, precision 8, 5568x3712, components

So the “only thing” that is needed is to make Camera Buddy understand NEF format with its exif data and download specific file range…

1 Like
18

That’s good news, I guess that implies downloading the raw image from the camera to mobile and using exiftool to extract jpeg?

exiftool along with JpgFromRaw which is a full size JPG, it has PreviewImage, and ThumbnailImage options, e.g.

preview.jpg: JPEG image data, baseline, precision 8, 640x424, components 3
fullsize.jpg: JPEG image data, baseline, precision 8, 6016x4016, components 3

dcraw apparently can extract JPEG too, but I am not familiar with that tool, at least exiftool exists as a SFOS package.