How to programmatically capture a webcam photo

Question

What's the simplest way in Ubuntu 11.10 to programmatically guide (either from Bash or Python) the user to capture a webcam photo of themselves?

I can launch a simple app like Cheese, but I don't see an easy way to immediately detect or retrieve the photo it captures. I can also access and record the webcam stream directly via OpenCV, but I'd have to reinvent the GUI to communicate with the user.

Is there any kind of script that's a happy medium, where I can launch it, and it prints on stdout the filename of the image the user took?

See also: [How can I take camera images with Python?](http://stackoverflow.com/q/28418962/562769) — Martin Thoma, Feb 09 '15 at 21:38
An ubuntu - CPP program to capture and extract frame and save as image file in the local folder. * FFMPEG * V4L2 https://github.com/abdullahfarwees/camera-frame-extracter — Abdullah Farweez, Sep 03 '18 at 05:56

score 39 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 02 '13 at 17:05

39

I like using pygame for that - it does not require you to open a Pygame SDL window, unlike when you want to use it to capture keyboard events, for example.

import pygame.camera
pygame.camera.init()
cam = pygame.camera.Camera(pygame.camera.list_cameras()[0])
cam.start()
img = cam.get_image()
import pygame.image
pygame.image.save(img, "photo.bmp")
pygame.camera.quit()

Though Pygame will only save uncompressed "bmp" files - you may want to combine it with PIL to write to other formats.

edited Apr 02 '13 at 17:05

Community

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answered Mar 15 '12 at 01:31

jsbueno

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By now, pygame can save to png, jpg, tiff and bmp. At least tose were the ones I tested. Just change the extension and pygame detects it. – steffen Mar 30 '16 at 12:32
pygame.camera.quit() doesn't work; use cam.stop() instead. – ingroxd Sep 27 '17 at 16:31

score 16 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 25 '23 at 14:33

16

If you want to do this via Python, it looks like you have a few options. The Pygame library has the ability to access cameras.

If that's unsatisfactory, you can go much lower level and access the Video 4 Linux 2 API directly using ioctl calls using Python's fcntl library.

edited Apr 25 '23 at 14:33

Bogdan Mart

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answered Mar 14 '12 at 23:49

Multimedia Mike

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Link for The Pygame library is wrong now. The requested URL /docs/tut/camera/CameraIntro.html was not found on the server. – Andark Dec 08 '16 at 15:44

How to programmatically capture a webcam photo

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