Hacking gphoto2 and libgphoto2

gphoto2 and libgphoto2, as installed

The gphoto2 executable is typically found in the /usr/bin directory, or perhaps in /usr/local/bin.

The libgphoto2 libraries are far more interesting, since they are in fact a whole collection of libaries in a couple of major groups.

On my linux system, I find two top level libraries:

libgphoto2.la (and libgphoto2.so)
libgphoto2_port.la (and libgphoto2_port.so)

Also, there are directories for each of these which in turn contain component libraries. The first one, libgphoto2_port contains a variety of libraries to support various sorts of low level communication (for my purposes, the usb port library is what matters):

cd libgphoto2_port/0.9.0
ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel   863 Feb 10 15:09 disk.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel 21340 Feb 10 15:09 disk.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel   845 Feb 10 15:09 ptpip.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel 15736 Feb 10 15:09 ptpip.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel   851 Feb 10 15:09 serial.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel 39013 Feb 10 15:09 serial.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel   839 Feb 10 15:09 usb.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel 48264 Feb 10 15:09 usb.so

The other directory, contains a vast arsenal of camera support libraries (camlibs), a few of which are listed here:

cd libgphoto2/2.4.4
....
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    886 Feb 10 16:53 barbie.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel  34934 Feb 10 16:53 barbie.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    880 Feb 10 16:53 canon.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel 316372 Feb 10 16:53 canon.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    898 Feb 10 16:53 casio_qv.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel  65426 Feb 10 16:53 casio_qv.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    928 Feb 10 16:53 clicksmart310.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel  45247 Feb 10 16:53 clicksmart310.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    892 Feb 10 16:53 digigr8.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel  61810 Feb 10 16:53 digigr8.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    886 Feb 10 16:53 digita.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel  66397 Feb 10 16:53 digita.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    892 Feb 10 16:53 dimagev.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel 104517 Feb 10 16:53 dimagev.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    910 Feb 10 16:53 dimera3500.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel  83577 Feb 10 16:53 dimera3500.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel    904 Feb 10 16:53 directory.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom wheel  49770 Feb 10 16:53 directory.so
....

Actually, the latter directory has many more libraries than this, but you get the idea.

In addtion the directory libgphoto2 holds an executable utility called print-camera-list. You can run it and amuse yourself via:

print_camera-list human-readable

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org