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Comment by alirov | Hacker News Reader

I used one to build a photobooth for my wedding. The raspberry pi controls a DSLR camera to take 4 photos, stitches them into a 4x6, prints the photo and uploads everything to a Google Photos album which was displayed live on a projector.

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I would be insanely interested in a thorough write-up of this. My mother is getting married in a few months and it would be incredible to build for her and her fiance!

I'll try and get the process written down but in the meantime, feel free to shoot me an email with any questions. You can find my email in my profile.

I'm also in the process of building a photobooth. Using the standard Pi Camera module + a Pimoroni Unicorn Hat HD to give people a prompt when the photo is about to be taken. It'll then publish the photos on it's own internal webserver that'll be visible on another Pi for easy emailing / browsing and tweeting! Going to pack it all in an transparent enclosure that looks like the approximate shape of an oversized DSLR.

Nice, that sounds quite a bit more compact than mine. Having really good quality photos for us to keep was the biggest priority so we settled on a DSLR and dedicated flash. Along with the printer, I ended up installing it all into an old speaker cabinet which ended up fitting everything perfectly. I do wish I wasn't living in an apartment at the time and had access to some better tools to build a proper enclosure though.

I've been looking to do this myself, did you follow any guides online to help you with this? How did you connect your camera to the Pi?

I looked at some guides for ideas and was hoping to find a ready to go solution but nothing seemed perfect for our use case. Good quality photos for keepsakes was a primary goal so I used this as an excuse to buy a DSLR (which still ended up being cheaper than renting a photobooth for a few hours would have been). I chose to code it up in Python since it seemed like the best candidate with plenty of libraries that could handle what I wanted. I chose a camera based on what devices were supported in gphoto2. Specifically, I chose a camera that supported live preview which allowed our guests to frame their photo better. I answered the question about connecting the camera in another comment but the tl;dr is that it was connected via USB and all communications were through the python app I wrote using the gphoto2 library.

Very cool. What were you using for your Google Photos uploader on Linux?

The photobooth application was written in Python and I was able to get picasawebsync (https://github.com/leocrawford/picasawebsync) working. Even though the documentation says it's probably no longer working, I can verify that it was working for me as of September 2016 which is after the Picasa deprecation. I had to edit the source a little so that I could call it from my app instead of the command line.

Another challenge was that I couldn't find a good application to display the Google photos album. Nothing I found would display any new photos added to the album after the slideshow had begun while also displaying everything in a continuous loop. I ended up writing a second small Python app also using picasawebsync to periodically sync the photos to a second Raspberry Pi which was hooked up to a projector and display them looped in a random order.

How do you get the pictures transferred to the pi?

The camera is hooked up to the raspberry pi via USB. I'm using the gphoto2 library in python to communicate with the camera, show a live preview on the attached LCD screen, snap photos and copy the photos onto the raspberry pi after they're taken.

Here's a list of cameras that gphoto2 supports: http://gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php

I made sure to buy a DSLR that supported live-preview so that our guests could frame themselves before the photos were taken.

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