Taking a Series of Pictures
In the example provided in Listing 4, gPhoto takes five pictures at ISO 200, aperture 2.8, at intervals of 10 seconds. It automatically transfers the images to the directory from which you ran the command.
Remotely Controlling the Camera
$ gphoto2 --set-config capture=on --set-config eos-iso=200 --set-config eos-aperture=6 --frames=5 --interval=10 --capture-image-and-download
Because the camera transfers the images directly to the disk, without the use of intermediate storage, you don't even need a memory card for this step. However, make sure the camera does not generate RAW and JPG images at the same time; otherwise, the large RAW files will soon fill up the cache because the application only auto-transfers and deletes the JPG images from cache memory. If the images are not automatically transferred to your computer, you can use --capture-image instead of --capture-image-and-download.
If you do not want to limit the number of images and let gPhoto take snapshots until your disk is full, or the battery is dead, delete the --frames switch from Listing 4. If you want the software to perform some action after transferring an image, you can specify the --hook-script=File option, which will launch the specified script (File; e.g., to rename or move an image, upload an image to an FTP server, or even send an email).
Christian Baun is a doctoral student at the Steinbuch Center for Computing (SCC), Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. His focus is on cloud computing, virtualization, and (free) operating systems.
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