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View Full Version : Controlling a Digital Camera from PC


Richard Slater
10-12-2007, 21:08
OK, here is the situation at times we need to take photographs of a few hundred people at a time. What we need is portrait photos of each person, they are standing or sitting in front of a screen so we can arrange it so that each person is sitting in the same position in each frame.

What we currently do is just take the pictures on a digital camera and record the sequence of people that we take pictures off, then go through the images and rename them to the primary key of the person who the picture is taken of. The issue with this method is that it is prone to human error, if someone forgets to record one of the names, or takes two photographs and doesn't record it, or misreads the list when renaming the images - all following images are mislabelled.

Ideally what I would like to do is to have a Laptop and a Digital Camera that are connected together via USB. We could then take a picture by clicking a button, pressing a key whatever which would be transferred to the PC, a barcode could then be scanned to associate the image with the person - rename the file and save it somewhere.

The software to handle barcodes, moving and renaming files can be handled not a problem. However I am struggling to find any camera that allows you to take pictures with a camera from a PC.

Any thoughts?

Rich_L
10-12-2007, 21:36
My aged old Canon A70 could do this through the application which came on the CD with the camera, I'm fairly sure it saved the picture to the computer as well but I'm not 100% about that.

Not much use, it seems like a simple enough thing I'm surprised most camera don't have an option or utility for this!

kaiowas
10-12-2007, 21:39
How about taking a still with a decent quality webcam or CCTV type camera? Or would the quality not be up to scratch?

Richard Slater
10-12-2007, 21:43
Web Cam tend to be quite grainy, they are optimized for video rather than stills. I thought about it but it was decided it probably wouldn't be very useful.

Desmo
11-12-2007, 08:49
Certainly sounds a tricky one and not something that would be common on a regular household camera. Not something I've ever seen I must say. I get the feeling you might be looking at some more specialist kit.

FakeSnake
11-12-2007, 09:38
Nikon Camera Control Pro works well, you can have pretty much full control of the camera.
http://www.europe-nikon.com/product/en_GB/products/broad/1122/overview.html
Obviously its for Nikons

Richard Slater
11-12-2007, 19:40
Talked to some more people about this, someone suggested this:

http://photopc.sourceforge.net/

With Olympus cameras, when I get access to the budget again in January will have to pick one up.