OK, we all accept that netbooks are low powered computers and that their cameras have low resolutions. On the other hand, they are portable and we can take them wherever we want, and when we are going to this “wherever” we often have our digital cameras with us. Let’s get going with each point and see how we can use our netbooks more efficiently.
I know that many of you will say that this is not something new. However, considering the applications that you will load on your netbook there is an easier way to import your digital photos with the command line: gphoto2.
Of course, instead of gphoto2, you can use an application such as F-Spot, digikam or Picasa. But, there is a downside here: Your netbook will probably have 1 Gigabyte of RAM in total and this will be allocated to many other programs. Using an additional graphical program will make the system allocate some of these resources to this program which, in turn, will make you experience a slower overall computer usage. Taking out the memory card and plugging it into your netbook is also fine, but your netbook must have a slot that can accept your digital camera’s media device. Also, you will have to deal with the task of taking out the memory card, plugging it into your netbook, taking it out, and plugging it back to your camera. On the other hand, you can just plug in your camera to your computer using a USB cable and download the pictures. I will take this option.
Gphoto2 is available in many distributions’ repositories. For Ubuntu, you can install the package with Synaptic or apt-get install gphoto2 from the command line.
After you plug in your camera, turn it on and set it to the mode that enables it to communicate with the computer. Then, open up a terminal and type gphoto2 --auto-detect to see your camera. The output will show your camera mark and model if it is recognized (such as Kodak EasyShare C653). Next, type gphoto --summary to see more information about your camera. You should see something like the following.
tolga@balci:~$ gphoto2 --summary
Detected a 'Kodak EasyShare C653’
Camera Summary:
Camera identification:
Model: Kodak EasyShare C653
Owner: Tolga BALCI
Power status: on battery (power OK)
Flash disk information:
Drive D:
331'558'644 bytes total
205'312'268 bytes available
Time: 2009-03-09 21:22:48 (host time +0 seconds)
Next, we go ahead and list the files by typing gphoto2 --list-files. You will see the list of files in your camera and memory card. To retrieve them to your computer, simply type gphoto2 --get-all-files.
Of course there are other tools available for this purpose. However, I have chosen gphoto2 for the job, because the command parameters are intuitive and very easy to remember.
Read on for more tricks for batch processing images and uploading