Announce: Release of Entangle v0.1.0 – An app for tethered camera control & capture

Posted: April 9th, 2010 | Filed under: Entangle | 3 Comments »

In the middle of the night on Wednesday I finally bundled up a first release of the application now called Entangle (formerly referred to as Capa). Entangle provides a GTK desktop application for tethered camera control & capture, using the gphoto library. This first v0.1.0 release includes

  • Control over nearly all camera settings exposed by libgphoto, from simple things like shutter speed, aperture, ISO, to advanced things like Nikon CLS flash group power, autofocus points and more.
  • Remote trigger of the camera shutter from the connected computer and download of the captured image
  • Preview of the scene to be captured using “live view” capability in recent dSLRs, though the UI needs work
  • Monitoring of the camera & automatic download of new images as they are captured
  • Fullscreen and presentation modes, xrandr aware, to allow display on arbitrary monitors
  • ICC profiles for accurate display of image colours. Use GNOME Colour Manager to setup your monitor profile

That may sound like a nice list of features, but there is still plenty of work to be done, not least improving the UI for controlling camera settings which is not at all scalable when there are hundreds of settings available. There is a crude plugin system taking advantage of GObject introspection to allow extensions to be written using JavaScript, but at Bastien’s suggestion I’ll likely re-write that to use libgpe. The engine of the app can also easily be used to create a GIMP plugin for image acquisition

The Fedora review is approved and so as soon as CVS is ready I’ll be building for F13 & rawhide, since the design team apparently want it to be part of the Design Studio Spin which surprised me somewhat !