Crowpi2, how can I take a photograph?

Comments

• Pearl

  May 2022 edited June 2022

  You can use the fswebcam app to capture photos with the built-in webcam with a resolution upto VGA (640x480). For detailed usage, consult the Man Page (man fswebcam). Or the Raspberry Pi official documentation.

  A quick example of taking a photo:

  1) Open a new Terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+t).

  2) Type the following command:

  fswebcam -r 640x480 Photo1.jpg

  3) Post in front of the camera, when ready to take a photo, press Enter.

  4) The new photo should be saved as Photo1.jpg in your home directory.

  For additional explanation, you can view this short Youtube video.
• Pearl

  June 2022

  Problem:

  • On the quick example above in step 2, the output file 'Photo1.jpg' will be over written without prompting each time when a picture is taken.

  Solution:

  You can write a Bash script which takes a picture with the webcam and save it with a filename based on the current time. The example script below saves the images in the /home/pi/webcam directory, so create the webcam subdirectory first with:

  mkdir /home/pi/webcam
  

  To create a script named webcam.sh, open up your editor of choice and write (or copy & paste) the following example code:

  #!/bin/bash
  
  DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S")
  
  fswebcam -r 640x480 --no-banner /home/pi/webcam/$DATE.jpg
  

  This script will take a picture and name the image file with a timestamp. Say we saved the script as webcam.sh, we would first make the file executable:

  chmod +x webcam.sh
  

  Then run with:

  ./webcam.sh
  

  Which would run the commands in the file and give the usual output:

  --- Opening /dev/video0...
  Trying source module v4l2...
  /dev/video0 opened.
  No input was specified, using the first.
  --- Capturing frame...
  Corrupt JPEG data: 2 extraneous bytes before marker 0xd6
  Captured frame in 0.00 seconds.
  --- Processing captured image...
  Disabling banner.
  Writing JPEG image to '/home/pi/webcam/2022-06-21_143826.jpg'.