[Wylug-discuss] Digital Camera Compatibility

[Tim Fletcher]

On Mon, 2011-03-28 at 23:17 +0100, Smylers wrote:
> Do all digital cameras work with Linux these days? If not, how does one
> check whether a particular model does before purchasing it?
> 
> A non-techie has very kindly said she will buy me a pocket digital
> camera for a present, and doesn't want to end up getting one that
> doesn't play nicely with my Ubuntu laptop. Is there anything I can tell
> her as a way of checking, or anything she should avoid (without her
> telling me the model in advance, thereby spoiling the surprise)?

I take a fair number of photos and do almost all of my photo management
and manipulation under linux. I have a a Canon EOS400D, a Canon S90 and
an iPhone4. The 2 Canons I remove the cards from and just plug them into
a £10 usb card reader and pull the photos off with f-spot, the iPhone
appears as a PTP camera and again I just import with f-spot. If I plug
the cameras in direct they also appear as PTP cameras and I can import
that way, however I find that a card reader + card is much easier and
faster.

For a beginner shotwell might be better, I've played about with it and
it seems to be better for the basics than f-spot, but it's RAW support
is a bit shaky so I've stuck with f-spot. To be fair RAW support in
Linux has ups and downs, I do now use the program DxO in a Windows7 VM
to do some RAW processing before I import.

Almost all of the Linux photo management programs use an sqlite DB with
photos stored as files in directory trees.

Some photos I took over Xmas are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timjdfletcher/sets/72157625964172625/

-- 
Tim Fletcher - Parrs Wood High School