Writing your own digital camera communications app

LoBo

Hi,

Have had a look around the internet with little luck:

I'm wondering how possible it is to write your own app to basically download pics from a digital camera. Does each camera manufacturer have its own system for communicating with its camera? Are there any standards etc? Is there anywhere with information on this topic?

Thanks

Colm

Rabies

why would you want to do something like this.... a challange??

digital cameras come with the software needed to download the images. so why the need to create one yourself.

are you trying to create a universal application for all makes/models ?

Kev

I got a digital camera(Olympus c220 zoom) 2 days ago and all i have to do is plug it in using usb and a drive letter appears in "My Computer" and i can just copy the jpegs off.
using Windows 2000

LoBo

basically I want to do more with the images: I want to use them in an application. I don't want to have to manually copy/get images from the camera, but have the application do it for me.

Hobbes

If it's stored on media like CF, SD, whatever you can get readers cheap (eg. Zio) which treat the card like a disk.

You would really need to know the camera.

Failing that most cameras use TWAIN which you can write an interface too.

Might want to move this thread to programming.

Rabies

Originally posted by LoBo
basically I want to do more with the images: I want to use them in an application. I don't want to have to manually copy/get images from the camera, but have the application do it for me.

i have a Canon A20 PowerShot. With it came software that does manual tasks you dont want to do. just hook it up to the usb cable and the software kicks in automaticaly. then all you have to do is click download/download all new and thats it.

Failing that most cameras use TWAIN which you can write an interface too.

uses TWAIN thingy, dunno what its for but its there.

Spunj

I did something similar for a website a couple years back. The person wanted to take photos and read them straight from the camera into the application I had done for backend product maintenance.

I got a component (think it was called ActiveTwain - Googles to http://www.mcm-design.dk/pages/twain000.htm) which allowed this and also provided on the fly compression/resizing etc. (not much good reading in a 2MB file when you need a 50k image).

That the kind of thing you need?

Spunj

LoBo

thanks for the feedback Hobbes and Spunj, I'm looking into TWAIN and the activetwain component you mention. I'll let you know how I get on