gthumb question

[Cefiar]

On Sunday 07 May 2006 06:21, Lee Revell wrote:
> Can someone explain what "Import" in gthumb is supposed to do?  When I
> plug in my digital camera I get a dialog with this option but it just
> launches gthumb pointed at the camera's mount point - it does not copy
> the pictures anywhere AFAICT.  Then when I click "Import" manually from
> within gthumb it says "No camera detected" and just sits and spins
> "Loading camera drivers" and has to be killed from a terminal.
>
> Shouldn't "Import" copy the pictures from the camera to my hard drive?

Firstly, I'm no expert on gthumb, but I'm going to try and explain the 
problems and why you're getting what you get.

It seems like you've got a camera that presents itself as a USB mass storage 
device, and not using some other protocol (eg: PTP over USB). Import is for 
connecting to a non-mass storage based camera, allowing you to pull the 
photos from the camera to disk.

Since your camera appears as a mass storage device, you can browse the camera 
yourself, and cut/copy/paste as you would with a USB key. For you then, the 
import button is useless.

Problem is that since you can hot-plug a PTP camera at any time, choosing when 
to enable or disable that import button is not an easy task. I'm pretty sure 
it could be done, but I'm guessing it would be a lot of work, for quite a 
small payoff.

That said, if you enable the digital camera support option in the Cameras tab 
under "System -> Preferences -> Removable Drives and Media" (well that's what 
it is in Breezy, YMMV), then you automatically get the import option when you 
plug the camera in.

Only time this then becomes a problem, is when you're trying to debug a 
problem in gthumb or libgphoto2 with regards to camera imports, as you may 
need to disable automatic stuff and run the commands manually a few times. 
I'm currently trying to basically debug such an issue with my new Canon 30D, 
which seems to works erratically when there are RAW (.CR2) files on the 
device as well as .JPG's. Trying to figure out now wether it's a libgphoto2 
issue, gthumb, or both.

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net