September 2009

If you're using Windows, you can buy some software from Nikon to have Photo Tethering (I guess it's called Tethering). I.e. you take a picture with your camera and it pops up on your computer screen. It's used in studio photography and very useful. I missed it very much during the last three days of product photography.

I wanted to have that on Linux as well. There is an excellent library called gphoto2, that can do half of the trick (i.e. it can download a picture right after the shot), but it can't display it. So I played around a little bit and wrote that script:

#!/bin/bash

case "$ACTION" in
    download)
        pkill qiv
        qiv -l -f -m "$ARGUMENT" &
        ;;
    "")
        me=$(cd ${0%/*} && echo $PWD/${0##*/})
        gphoto2 --capture-tethered --hook-script=$me
        ;;
esac

To "install" it, place it somewhere on your path.

To use it, connect your Nikon camera to your computer via USB. Go to an empty folder in a shell and just start it:

rian@thunder:~Pictures/example$ tether

Then take pictures. They will be displayed on your screen and stored in your current folder.

For this to work, you need the image-viewer qiv (or use any other viewer and adjust the script) in its most recent version (older versions don't support the -l switch which autorotates the image), if you're using ubuntu jaunty, you need to install qiv from karmic.

And you have to install gphoto2 to access the camera as well.