Pull Images from a Digital Camera
Get the images from your camera with either standard USB storage device support or gphoto.
So you have a digital camera full of pictures, and you have a Linux machine with the GIMP raring to go, but you need to get the pictures from the camera to the computer under Linux. As this hack illustrates, using your digital camera under Linux is not much of a headache, particularly with newer distributions and newer cameras.
Although there are many ways to categorize digital cameras, when it comes to using them under Linux there are only two categories: cameras that act as USB storage devices and cameras that don’t. Generally, newer cameras act like USB storage devices (such as a USB thumb drive) when plugged into a computer, but many older cameras use proprietary communication standards even though they use standard USBs or serial ports. The easiest way to tell which type of camera you have is to plug it into a non-Linux system. If it shows up as a regular hard drive, under Linux you can treat it like a USB storage device. Otherwise you may have to go the gtkam route, which I describe later, in the section, “Non-USB Storage Devices.”
USB Storage Devices
Most modern desktop Linux distributions offer automatic management of USB storage devices—just plug in a USB key or other device, and KDE or Gnome will automatically create a new icon on your desktop that you can click to access the device. If you have such a distribution, then using your digital camera is ...