Digital camera

This article is about how you can use digital cameras that have a USB connection with Linux. There are two types of digital cameras: mass storage cameras and PTP cameras. With mass storage devices you connect the camera via USB and can read the photographs as if the camera was a USB hard disk. With PTP cameras, you need software to read the pictures. On most cameras, you can switch if you want to use them as PTP or mass storage cameras. This article uses SUSE Linux 11.1 as example, but it should work same or similar on every Linux distribution.

Find out what you have

In your digital camera's menu, try to find the menu item that makes the distinction between your camera acting as mass storage USB device and PTP device. Set it to the mass storage option. If you do not find the item and are still unsure which type of camera you have, you will have to try both options, PTP and mass storage.

Mass storage cameras

Make sure your system log is empty. open a console and type

dmesg -c

Now connect your camera to a USB port and type

dmesg

PTP cameras

If you have a PTP USB digital camera, you can get all its pictures transferred with gphoto2. To install and run it, open a console and type

mkdir photos
cd photos
sudo yast -i gphoto2
gphoto2 --get-all-files