Capa: a desktop application for photo capture via a digital camera

A couple of months ago I attended an LPMG event on the subject of off-camera flash. The talk was quite interactive with the presenters using a wide array of camera and flash equipment on stage to demonstrate the techniques they were covering. The cameras were connected to a laptop, in turn connected to a projector, allowing the audience to view the photos on the big screen as soon as they were captured.

I’m not entirely certain, but I believe the presenters were using Nikon Camera Control Pro on the laptop for control of the digital SLR. Watching it, I couldn’t help wondering if it was possible to do remote camera control & capture on a Linux laptop using only open source software. After a short investigation I discovered that, in addition to its image file download/management capabilities, gphoto allows for triggering the shutter and changing settings on digital cameras. Applications providing graphical frontends to gphoto though, only appeared to expose its image file download/management capabilities. Thus decided to write a graphical frontend myself. I’m calling it Capa

Before continuing with more wordy stuff, here is what everyone is really wanting, a screenshot

The goal of the Capa application is to provide a simple and efficient interface for tethered shooting and controlling camera settings. It will leave all file management tasks to other applications such as the gphoto plugins for GVFS or FUSE. The two main libraries on which the application is built are gphoto and GTK. The source code is being licensed under the terms of the GPLv3+

The code is at a very early stage of development with no formal releases yet, but it is at the point where it might be useful to people beyond myself, hence this blog posting. At this point it is capable of either triggering the camera shutter directly, or event monitoring where it detects photos shot on the camera. In both cases it will immediately download and display all photos. When a new image is detected it will be immediately downloaded & displayed. The images are not left on the memory card. The current session defines a directory on the host computer where all images are saved, defaulting to a directory under $HOME/Pictures (or wherever your XDG preferences point). The UI for changing tunable settings is rather crude. If you’re lucky it may work, but don’t count on it yet :-)

The interface is fully colour management aware. It is capable of automatically detecting the monitor’s current configured ICC profile in accordance with the X11 ICC profile specification. All images displayed by the application, whether full size or as thumbnails, will have the necessary colour profile transformation applied. GNOME Colour Manager is an excellent new app for configuring your display profiles in the necessary manner for them to work with Capa. Integration with HAL allows immediate automatic detection of any newly plugged in USB cameras and similar support for UDev is planned.

In the very near future it is intended that GObject introspection and GJS will be used to support a JavaScript plugin engine. The codebase has a strict separation between its object model and UI model specifically designed to facilitate plugins. This will allow end user customization & scripting of the UI to best suit their needs. For example, timer triggered shooting, motion detection and many other neat ideas could be provided via plugins.

For a little more information visit the Capa website.