gphoto2
			       -------

Hello and welcome to the wonderful world of gphoto! This is gphoto2, the 
successor of gphoto with lots of new features and additional camera
drivers. 

If you miss a feature, would like to report success or failure, or have any
questions, please don't hesitate to contact our mailing list.


What is gphoto2?
----------------

gphoto2 is a library that can be used by applications to access various 
digital cameras.  

Additionally, the command-line frontend, which is shipped with the library,
is called gphoto2, too.

For more information on gphoto, see

        http://www.gphoto.org

There, you can also get information on mailing lists, supported cameras,
and availability of gphoto2. Another source of information is

        http://www.sourceforge.org/projects/gphoto

where you can access our CVS server to fetch the source code of
gphoto2, gtkam and GnoCam (see below).


What is gphoto2 not?
--------------------

gphoto2 itself is not a GUI application, opposed to gphoto. There are
GUI frontends for the gphoto2 library, however, such as gtkam for
example.

gphoto2 can only talk to cameras the language of those it understands. That is,
if you own a camera that speaks a language that isn't published anywhere and 
nobody has been able to figure out the meaning of the sentences, gphoto2 cannot
communicate with those cameras. 

Then, there are cameras supporting the so-called USB Mass Storage protocol.
This is a protocol that has been published and lets you access any storage
device, be it a camera or a disk connected via USB to your computer. As there
are already drivers for this protocol out there, you don't need an additional
program like gphoto2. As of now, the following cameras seem to support the 
USB Mass Storage protocol:
 * Casio QV [2x00,3x00,8000]
 * Fuji FinePix S1 Pro, [1400,2400,4700]Zoom, 1300, 4500
 * HP PhotoSmart 315, 618, 912
 * Konica KD300Z
 * Kyocera Finecam s3
 * Leica Digilux 4.3
 * Minolta Dimage 5 & 7
 * Nikon Coolpix 775, 995
 * Olympus C-100, C-200Z, C-700, C-860L, C-2040, C-3020Z, C-3040Z, 
   C-4040Zoom, D-510, E-10
 * Pentax Optio 330
 * Sony DSC-F505(V), DSC-P1, DSC-P5, DSC-P20, DSC-P30, DSC-F707
Again, those cameras cannot be accessed through gphoto2.

Other camera support a protocol called PTP or USB Imaging Devices that has
been developped by Kodak and other. gphoto2 does not fully support PTP yet
and needs some testing. Here is a short list of camera that use this protocol:
 * HP PhotoSmart 318, 612, 715
 * Kodak DC-4800, DX-3215, DX-3500, DX-3600, DX-3700, DX-3900, MC3 and all the
   camera that use Kodak Easy Share(tm) system.
 * Sony DSC-P5, DSC-F707, DSC-P30, DSC-P50, DSC-S75, DSC-S85, MVC-CD300
   (all need user configuration of the camera)
You may try jPhoto <http://jphoto.sourceforge.net/> for ptp cameras
alternatively if gphoto fails.


Platforms
---------

gphoto2 should compile and run on pretty much all Unix-like platforms.
Additionally, there is a port for OS/2 available. gphoto2 has _not_ (yet?) 
been ported to any operating system from MicroSoft.


How to set up gphoto2
---------------------

For information on how to set up gphoto2, see doc/gphoto2.txt (or
wherever your package maintainer put this file). It includes
information about setting up USB hotplugging. 

If you run into problems, you may also consult the doc/FAQ file (or
wherever your package maintainer put it).


Frontends
---------

gphoto2 ships with a command line frontend which is quite powerful, 
especially in combination with scripts. See gphoto2-cli.txt for a
short description. 

For the GUI lovers, there are for example gtkam (GTK based), and
GnoCam (GNOME). Additionally, there are plugins for other programs
available like kio_gphoto (KDE - Konqueror). 


Reporting Bugs
--------------

Every piece of software contains errors and flaws. So does
gphoto2. When you encounter something that does not work, please do
the following: 

1. Find out whether this is a known problem.

2. Reproduce the problem with debug output enabled and the language
   set to English, so that the development team will understand the
   messages. You can do this by running:

      env LC_ALL=C gtkam

   if you're using the gtkam frontend or running:

      env LC_ALL=C gphoto2 --debug <options>

   using the gphoto2 command line interface.

3. Report the problem on the mailing list with the corresponding debug
   output if it is small. If it is more than a few kilobytes, please
   don't post the complete debug output on the list.