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?

10-12-2007, 21:08	#1
Richard Slater Long Island Iced Tea Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Brighton, UK Posts: 285	Controlling a Digital Camera from PC 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?