Digital Camera Links

Sony DSC-P93 & Linux

I was given a Sony DSC-P93 for my birthday. Quite a good price for a 5 Megapixel camera, only problem is now I need bigger memory sticks

I fully expected this to Just Work under Linux. My Sony Handycam is detected as a mass storage device and I can mount /dev/sda1 and away I go. The DSC-P93 however was a no show, it wasn't claimed by the usb-storage driver. I should really start looking into a product's Linux compatability before handing over cash else it's going to cost me some day :)

Turns out Sony use a protocol called PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) developed by Kodak. Follow the instructions in the gPhoto2 manual. There are two gotchas :

First, the current gPhoto (2.1.4) doesn't support a DSC-P93 directly, just tell it to use a DSC-P92 instead. The following will do the trick:

gphoto2 --camera "Sony DSC-P92 (PTP mode)"  --port "usb:"

You need to change a setting on the camera to use PTP mode. When you attach a USB cable, hit the menu button, then select "USB Connect" and choose PTP mode.

Finally if its all set up right, you should be able to issue the following command to download all the pictures

 gPhoto2 --get-all-files