Upon startup, the camera program presents a live viewfinder and a couple of buttons. The majority of the screen itself functions as the shutter “button” — tap to take a still photo.
At the bottom of the screen are two buttons. The left button (with the gear icon) will take you to various settings. The right button (with the “play” symbol) lets you review previously-taken photos (if no photos have been taken yet, the camera will let you know it’s “empty”).
The left/right arrow buttons at the top of the screen select among the settings options:
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Photos Folder: images will be saved inside a “Photos” folder in your Raspberry Pi home directory (the folder will be created if it doesn’t exist). They can be easily accessed from other programs on the Pi, but this partition isn’t easily accessed when inserting the SD card in other computers.
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Boot Partition: images will be saved in the folder “/boot/DCIM/CANON999” on the boot partition. When the SD card is inserted in another computer, it mimics a card from a digital camera and may import photos automatically, depending on system settings. The downside is that space in the boot partition is very limited; you might only store a dozen or so photos there.
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Dropbox: as previously discussed, images are saved in the Photos folder as well as uploaded to Dropbox (if WiFi is connected and Dropbox configured).
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Large (2592x1944, 4:3 ratio): this is the largest size (5 megapixels) supported by the Raspberry Pi camera. The actual area captured stretches well beyond what’s shown in the live viewfinder though.
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Medium (1920x1080, 16:9 ratio): HD resolution, widescreen, 2 megapixels.
- Small (1440x1080, 4:3 ratio): 1.5 megapixels.
There are 16 different artistic effects that can be applied to photos (plus “normal,” no effect). Make your photos look like an oil painting, or a pen sketch, or turn the colors weird! These all operate on the live preview as well.
This is a tradeoff…more sensitive settings (higher numbers) work better in low light, but the resulting image may be grainy.
ISO has no effect on the live viewfinder, only captured photos.
Tap the red button to exit, the arrow buttons for other settings, or the Done button to cancel.
All the camera settings will be saved; next time you run the script, all prior settings will be as you left them.