Mounting a USB camera [SOLVED]

tel · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Aug 2006 Posts: 112

Not exactly a gentoo-specific question, but a more general question.

I'm trying to get photos off my Canon Powershot, which is a standard USB digital camera. I plug it in, turn on the power, and dmesg definitely shows me that it's available as a USB bus device. Unfortunately, it doesn't assign a mountable device to it (no /dev/sdb1 created or any other /dev/sd?)

I can write a udev rule so that it creates /dev/camera without problem, and that newly created device is just linked to the usb bus that dmesg reported, but mounting /dev/camera doesn't work because it's not a block device.

Question: How can I create a mountable device associated with this usb camera so I can mount it and extract its pictures? I'm not using Gnome or KDE, so I haven't installed any of those tools that might do it automatically (and I don't want to install those, either).

Thanks...

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Well, either your camera is mountable and (barring a bad kernel config) it should just work or it's not and you'll need something like media-gfx/gphoto2.

netfab · Posted: Wed May 09, 2012 9:54 am Post subject:

or media-libs/libptp2.

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3468 Location: Canada

As people said, not every camera presents itself as a usb storage device, and actually Canon's often don't. Then you need to talk to them over specialized protocol.

Your other option is to take an SD card out and stick it into the card reader.

tel · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Aug 2006 Posts: 112

Yep. Taking the SD card out and using a reader works fine. I also note that others have had similar issues with Canon (and other) cameras, and gphoto2 is a reasonable way to go.

I'll mark this at SOLVED. Thanks!