[KLUG Members] Error Using Digital Camera

[Marr]

On Monday 12 December 2005 07:34am, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > >>> I have a Kodak EasyShare Z740 digital camera.  When connected to
> > >>> my SuSe
> > >>> 10 Laptop F-Spot (0.1.2) immediately opens and displays
> > >>> thumbnails of
> > >>> all the images in the camera.  And it asks if I want to import these
> > >>> photos.  I click the button to proceed and it stops with...
> > >>
> > >> USB?
> > >
> > > Yes.
> > >
> > >> What's /var/log/messages say?
> > >
> > > Just - Dec 11 14:39:38 aleph kernel: usb 2-1: new full speed USB
> > > device
> > > using uhci_hcd and address 4
> >
> > Did you try mounting the USB device manually?
> > It seems like I had to do that once.
> > "fdisk -l" usually shows what device it's assigned.
>
> It doesn't seem to show up as a mass storage device,  it is something
> called a PTP device (I have no idea what that means technically).

'PTP' is 'Picture Transfer Protocol'.

>From Hubert Figuiere's useful site ('Digital Camera Support for UNIX, Linux 
and BSD'):

   http://www.teaser.fr/~hfiguiere/linux/digicam.html

----------

PTP, Picture Transfer Protocol, is a standardized protocol mainly developed by 
Kodak whose goal is to provide a standard way to access digital camera. This 
protocol has been adopted by the USB consortium to handle Still Image Device 
class (6). A complete specification of the protocol has been published. See 
the sourceforge project [http://ptp.sourceforge.net/].

----------

PTP has support by other manufacturers these days too.  See Hubert's table of 
camera support.

On Monday 12 December 2005 08:22am, Bruce Smith wrote:
> Just curious, but how old of a camera is this?  Not how long you've
> owned it, but is this old technology before they started using the USB
> mass storage stuff?  I hope so, because I'd hate to think they are
> switching to some other protocol in new cameras now!

> Crap, because it "just works" now (with mass storage support).
> They couldn't just leave well enough alone ...    :-(

Ideally, you want both supported. 'USB Mass Storage' support is great for 
compatibility, but lousy for anything exotic. 'PTP' supports many more 
things, like commanding the camera to take a snapshot under PC control. Yeah, 
I know many people don't care about anything but grabbing the images, but 
(standardized, documented) camera protocols to implement useful behavior 
extensions are a _good_ thing, not a bad thing! :^)

A camera which supports USB Mass Storage may be in 'PTP' mode by default -- 
you should be able to switch it over via the camera menus though.

I'm going from memory on this -- it's been a long time since I last provided a 
patch to the gphoto2/libgphoto2 project, but I think PTP is still a popular 
protocol.

Aside: My old Kodak DC260 actually uses a neat (but now defunct) operating 
system called 'Digita' by FlashPoint. It was very capable but no longer in 
use. :^(  I suspect that PTP (and USB Mass Storage) will be around a lot 
longer.

HTH....

Bill Marr