Comment by joeuser | September 15, 2008 | 10:54 pm

One of the things I’d do is write a shell script that will, in one press, shoot a picture and push it to my website — without having to deal with any objc, private framework crap or use someone else’s slow, roundabout solution that does 15 other things that I don’t need.

Something else I would like to do is set up a cron job that would ping my server for a particular variable that, when altered (by me), it would capture pictures and send them to my email or something. (think: theft recovery that is more useful than just gathering “findme” results)

I’m just guessing here, but I’d say that the people that want picSnap ported are the folks that don’t have the time or interest to use your tools in native applications (the minority, I’m sure), but still want to take advantage of as much of the phone’s hardware as possible by traditional, “tinker” means.

Does that make any sense?

Comment by nico1408 | September 16, 2008 | 8:15 am

Hello,
I plan to use it less smartly than joeuser… my primary need is to use it and netatalk in a shell script to simulate a little webcam that can send the picture to my website every X minutes (where X is the delay between 2 pictures hard coded in the shell script).
But if joeuser publish his (her?) script I would be happy to use it too…

Thank you in advance, Erica…

Comment by dvb123 | September 21, 2008 | 2:49 pm

Ditto. I’m looking to knock something together without using SDK. It will take a pic every few seconds, drop it into the doc root of my iPhone httpd server. I’ll then view said pic from a client located somewhere else.

Do I really have to save up, by an Intel mac, put Leopard on it, create a Cocoa app to do it.

Pleeeese port this to 2.x

David Victor.

Comment by WiFone | September 22, 2008 | 11:30 am

Check UIKit Tools in Cydia. It contains “uishoot”.

NB: for your convenience, make sure to be user “mobile” when using it (e.g.: ssh in as user “mobile”, not as “root”, then execute “uishoot”), since it stores the snapshots in the user pictures folder; only user “mobile” ’s pics show up in the Photos.app though (which makes for easy browsing, transfer etc.).

Comment by dvb123 | September 22, 2008 | 12:12 pm

Many thanks. Looks like this will do the trick.

Comment by joeuser | September 22, 2008 | 1:58 pm

“uishoot” takes a screen shot of your iphone’s “desktop.” It doesn’t actually shoot a picture with the camera.

Thanks though.. =\

Comment by dvb123 | September 22, 2008 | 5:51 pm

Works for me. 4 lines of ‘cgi’ + a tiny shell script to call ‘uishoot’ in the background & I’ve got exactly what I was after. Very basic still image serving via http (lighttpd).

It does take a snap of the desktop, but if you’ve got the camera “open” then you get the picture .. albeit with the UI stuck on the bottom.

Comment by joeuser | September 22, 2008 | 8:05 pm

dvb123: that’s awesome. I’m afraid I’m after the full resolution of the camera, not just what is displayed on the UI when you’re shooting a picture.

Comment by dvb123 | September 23, 2008 | 2:02 am

> after the full resolution of the camera, not just what >is displayed on the UI when you’re
> shooting a picture

Ah yes. You have a good point there - uishoot only gives you a 320×480 PNG.

Apologies for the premature celebration.

David.

Comment by miahill9 | October 1, 2008 | 1:38 pm

Just wondering if this has moved at all? I still miss picsnap, i had mine set up like joeuser was explaining in the first post. pushing pics from my phone to my web site. I also wanted to tie it into locate me, but never got that far.

Comment by v8media | October 6, 2008 | 8:43 pm

Time lapse photography.

Before the update to 2.0 I found some program that would take pictures every so often. Whenever I synced, I would categorize the images, which gave time lapses of the various places where I work or hang out. I’d always aim the camera a bit, but I also got some great stuff from things like the phone shooting down while in the car cradle. It got enough light to give a blurry image that pulsed a bit in brightness. I use some of these clips for doing visuals for shows.

That was something like 1gb of photos a day. You’d be amazed how much time your phone spends just sitting around getting one consistent, and potentially interesting shot. I’m one of the two people that bought the stupid plastic cover for the iPhone that has the “telescope” lens (don’t buy it, it’s horrible).

This is the thing that I miss the most from pre-2 days. My phone is hacked though, ready and waiting for something to fill that void. Being able to script the camera, or at least have more control than the previous program would be great.

Thanks for all the hackery you do! It is appreciated.

Ian

Comment by ScaredyCat | October 18, 2008 | 4:35 pm

I registered just to comment here.

I really don’t understand why you’d be ‘weirded out’ by people asking you to make an application you wrote for pre 2.0 firmware to work with >=2.0 firmware. It seems to me that you thought it was good enough for pre 2.0. so why not post.

Of course if you didn’t want to, an you seem to not want to bother, perhaps you could just release the source so someone else could.

Thanks for the utils btw.

Comment by Erica Sadun | October 18, 2008 | 7:55 pm

The weirding out comes from several people who sent me email explicitly stating they wanted to be able to ssh into an iPhone so they could take pictures of their girlfriends when they didn’t know it. I was trying to make sure there were other reasons for the requests.

Comment by joeuser | October 18, 2008 | 10:17 pm

Another shining example of how a few bad apples ruins everyone’s fun.

Hopefully we’ve convinced you otherwise…

Comment by ScaredyCat | October 19, 2008 | 12:06 pm

@Erica

Ok, fair enough, you’re right that probably should have weirded you out

Personally I’m looking at experimenting with taking snaps at, say, 1 min intervals during the day so I can see if I can generate ‘what I did today’ type thing, then perhaps analyzing a week of pictures to establish routine.

To be honest I think more interesting and useful uses will come from experimentation.

I promise, no girlfriend pictures. The wife wouldn’t tolerate either

Comment by dvb123 | November 2, 2008 | 5:02 am

I agree taking a photo of someone without their knowledge or consent is dubious. But can one legislate for human behaviour ? The responsibility lies with the individual & what they choose to do.

I would not feel comfortable providing functionality which I suspected would be used for immoral purposes.

Tough one …

Comment by nico1408 | November 5, 2008 | 11:19 am

Hello Erica, to answer to your comment,

it’s a shame that people want to use picSnap like that. For me I am married with 3 children, and I have other things to do rather than doing such things… it’s a pity that because of this kind of people, we (the iphone community) have to pay the price… but I understand you.

Otherwise, I tried to do it by myself, but I have a problem, may you give advise to me :
in 2.0 CameraController does not exist and it seems that we have to use UIImagePickerController instead but i can’t, for now, use it in a CLI binary. Am I wrong?
My code compiles without error and display my messages in the console, but no picture is taken…

The UIImagePickerController is initialized but “(void)imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)picker
didFinishPickingImage:(UIImage *)image
editingInfo:(NSDictionary *)editingInfo” is not called… do I have to call it manually?

thank you for all your work for the iphone plateform and the iphone community.
___
Nico148

PS: sorry for my english, it is not my mother tongue, I am from France.

Comment by joeuser | December 8, 2008 | 10:24 am

Just wanted to follow up on this. It doesn’t look like it’ll be released anytime soon. Have you thought about releasing the source?

Comment by barns | December 15, 2008 | 5:34 pm

It’s quite a simple app to write, however since version 2.0 the camera controller framework has been changed and as far as I can tell will no longer work as a true command line application.

If any one can prove me wrong then great, but I suspect even if Erica wanted to port it - she couldn’t

but actually why does it need to be run from the command line? Could it not be an normal UI App ?

Comment by barns | December 15, 2008 | 6:21 pm

nico1408,

Le Framework du CameraController pour la version 2,0 est toujours là mais Il a été déplacé à Private Frameworks et s’appelle maintenant PLCameraController.

J’espere il sera t’aider

Comment by barns | December 15, 2008 | 6:25 pm

nico1408,

Le Framework du CameraController pour la version 2,0 est toujours là mais Il a été déplacé à Private Frameworks et s’appelle maintenant PLCameraController.

J’espère qu’il t’aidera

Barns

Comment by nico1408 | December 18, 2008 | 4:31 am

Thank you barns, I tried to follow your advice but not since to work, at least on my 2.2 iphone.
the PLCameraController doesn’t want to instanciate…

I tried to instanciate it by doing :
[objc_getRequiredClass(”PLCameraController”) sharedInstance];
and I get “objc[1496]: link error: class ‘PLCameraController’ not found.”
I tried too :
“[objc_getClass(”PLCameraController”) sharedInstance];” but the result is NULL… :’-(

The PLCameraController doesn’t seem to be registred in the objective c runtime….

did I make something wrong?

Comment by barns | December 18, 2008 | 6:34 am

Nico,

Have you imported the PLCameraController.h ?

If you don’t have it you’ll need to class-dump it from the SDK or the iPhone.

Make sure you have also include the path for the Private Framework when compiling (-F)

Si tu veux, je peux ecrire un petit exemple et le mettre en ligne.

Bonne chance !

Comment by joeuser | December 18, 2008 | 9:22 am

@Barns:

If you read through some the comments (earlier ones), there are a few examples that speak to the usefulness of picSnap as a command line utility as opposed to a UI app.

Comment by miahill9 | March 1, 2009 | 7:00 pm

Any one get any where with this? is it possible? Nico, did you make it work? What about making a UI app, that opens snaps a pic, then closes? Erica maybe you can force your command line app to make a noise or flash the screen bright to alleviate any spy concerns?

Still with hope

Comment by CeeJayCee | March 20, 2009 | 6:37 am

I would love this to be ported to OS 2.0 - I want to create a background application that dials home to determine if the phone is stolen, then capture an image and then email it to myself (I think you previously had an image email application too?).

Comment by mitchell | May 9, 2009 | 4:10 pm

Hey Erica!

I would love to use this utility to turn the iphone into a wireless webcam.

My dad has an old PowerBook, and we would like to do video chat. My options are to either try and find an old iSight camera or to buy him a WiFi enabled smart phone. The latter sounds best!

I’m really familiar with scripting and open source nix apps, so I know I’d be able to extend this software the extra mile.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed your software tremendously over the past year or so. Thank you very much!

Comment by marcomoscardini | May 13, 2009 | 3:10 am

Has anyone tried to use ffmpeg to capture directly, on the unix version, it is possible to even record videos from a v4l compatible device… I have tried but I failed to find the video device in /dev/

maybe, there is no supported driver… that would be really nice development… any volunteers :-)?

do not forghet that boyfriends too could soffer the same treatment (spycam) and to that extend… audio is by far more “intrusive”…. are you planing to stop development of recAudio too?

perverts are all around, but stopping development due to that, seams to me just an excuse and what is worse is that it proves that perverts can succeeded to freek you out enogth (they win, community looses)

there is no stop to development, and just not being part of it… it gives you less power on what can be done with the tool, think about it. (resolution limitations, flash,sound…. all thinks that being developer yo could decide o implement…)