Transfer photos from Nikon DSLR on Ubuntu

Saving the photos from my Nikon D60 onto my laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 was a bit problematic. F-spot worked initially but then it seemed a bit complicated and really I wanted to use picassa to manage my photos as it works so nicely.

Picassa wouldn’t import the photos from the camera and just froze when trying to do so, I installed f-spot again but that was having difficulty connecting to the camera for some reason.

I finally came across the perfect tool for simply getting the photos off the camera so I could move them and edit them on the computer and manage using picassa.

gphoto2 is simple software for achieving just that. A few easy steps and you can grab all the photos you need easily from the command line and into the current folder you are in…

Some of the useful commands I used:

gphoto2 –auto-detect
To find the camera that is connected.

gphoto2 –list-files
To list all the photos on the camera.

gphoto2 –get-all-files
To get all the files on the camera and import them to the current working directory. I used this one in conjunction with the -f folder option to specify which folder on the camera I wanted to import.

Resources:
gphoto2
Using the gphoto2 command line interface
Nikon D70 under Linux

UPDATE:
I’m now using the graphical interface to this tool: gtkam.

Profile:  Frank has been programming for the web using PHP, Javascript and numerous libraries and frameworks for the past 6 years. More articles.