Mounting Canon PowerShot A590
First I should note that I assume GNOME or KDE probably does a great job automounting the Canon PowerShot A590, or at least getting the pictures off of it. Not having GNOME or KDE, however, I'd like to do it from the command line.
Lots of cameras will automatically be recognized as USB mass-storage devices. If this is your camera, great. Just find the camera with "fdisk -l" (as root), and mount it. Then use it like any other mounted drive. Unfortunately, The PowerShot A590 does not work that way (I think it may use PTP - Photo Transfer Protocol). For these kinds of devices, "fdisk -l" yields nothing. You can, however, see that the system took note of the camera if you look at /var/log/messages
Apr 21 11:28:42 tv kernel: [ 8006.701357] usb 6-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6 Apr 21 11:28:42 tv kernel: [ 8006.839278] usb 6-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice Apr 21 11:28:42 tv kernel: [ 8006.842357] usb 6-2: New USB device found, idVendor=04a9, idProduct=3176 Apr 21 11:28:42 tv kernel: [ 8006.842357] usb 6-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 Apr 21 11:28:42 tv kernel: [ 8006.842357] usb 6-2: Product: Canon Digital Camera Apr 21 11:28:42 tv kernel: [ 8006.842357] usb 6-2: Manufacturer: Canon Inc. Apr 21 11:28:42 tv kernel: [ 8006.842357] usb 6-2: SerialNumber: 9CA872EC36E04292B3602599D62AC848
I had heard of gphoto2, so I did an apt-cache search to see what was available.
apt-cache search gphoto2 dcraw - decode raw digital camera images gphoto2 - The gphoto2 digital camera command-line client gphotofs - filesystem to mount digital cameras gthumb-data - an image viewer and browser - arch-independent files gthumb - an image viewer and browser gtkam-gimp - gtkam gimp plugin gtkam - GTK+ application for digital still cameras gvfs-backends - userspace virtual filesystem - backends kamera - digital camera io_slave for Konqueror libgphoto2-2-dev - gphoto2 digital camera library (development files) libgphoto2-2 - gphoto2 digital camera library libgphoto2-port0 - gphoto2 digital camera port library libwine-gphoto2 - Windows API implementation - camera module libwine-twain - Windows API implementation - empty transitional package
I saw gphoto2, but gphotofs sounded more interesting, so I tried it. Having tried it, I advise against it. It does kind of work, but I found it to be buggy (especially about permissions), and not nearly as nice to work with as gphoto2. If you choose to try it, the short man page should explain everything you need (man gphotofs).
gphoto2, however, is really a joy to work with. It's incredibly simple, and works really well. Here are the basics:
## Install gphoto2 (this needs to be done as root) apt-get install gphoto2 ## Plug the camera in via USB, make sure you're in Playback mode (as opposed to Shooting mode), and turn it on ## Some people recommend this step to recognize your camera, but I found it unnecessary gphoto2 --auto-detect ## List what pictures/videos are on the camera # The list will be numbered - later you can use those numbers to download specific photos gphoto2 -L ## Download all pictures/videos gphoto2 -P ## If you just want thumbnails, you can get them with gphoto2 -T ## If you have feh installed, you can easily view the thumbnails with feh -t . ## Download only a particular picture (or a range of pictures) using the numbers from the list produced by "gphoto2 -L". gphoto2 -p 10 # obviously you can select any number here. ## That's pretty much all of the commands I ever need to use. There's lots more that gphoto2 does, however, and it's well-documented in man gphoto2