SHOOOT-PLAYTIME

Holiday time.....now it is time to play around with.... what? I have an old camera Nikon P5100. Question: can I control that camera from a PC? I did want to create trouble on my training/work related laptop so I fired up my Raspberry Pi.
After a bit of Google browsing I found out that you can control a camera from a PC:

1. first you have to install gphoto2 on the pi; here is the recipe to install from scratch . To compile the whole thing takes a bit of time, but after a cup of coffee you are ready to.

2. Hook up the camera with a usb connection and open a terminal. Here is an overview of the commands to check if gphoto2 is working. Take care that the pi is not opening the SD-card of the camera through auto mounting removable media; turn that off.

3. Now you want to take some shots. This is how you that from the command line .

4. Of course you cannot remember all these commands with detailed option. Well there are scripts on github. Shooot is a very nice one.

5. Finally.. you prefer a GUI, use gphoto-bottle . BTW the P5100 is quite limited in use with gphoto2, no movie, no streaming, only shooting pictures in a time sequence. So better use a newer camera!