How to use old USB digital camera as webcam to take pictures on the Raspberry Pi

What to do with that old USB digital camera? Rather than relegate it to the junk drawer to collect dust forever, why not make it useful again as a webcam? By following these simple guidelines you can use your old USB camera as a webcam.

In the example i connected the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B with the Agfa's ePhoto CL18 that is an entry-level digital camera with a fixed focus 45mm lens which allows you to capture 640 x 480 images at ISO 200.

We will use a software named Gphoto2  to accomplish our mission. Gphoto2 is a tool that can be used for remotely control many cameras from the console. You can install by the following command through terminal

sudo apt-get install gphoto2

Now connect your camera via USB to the Raspberry and use the command

lsusb

to get output directly relating to your camera. Now you can control your camera with the Gphoto2 command line tool but first see if your camera it is recognized by the command

gphoto2 --auto-detect

if everything goes well now you can use the command

gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download 

this command takes a photo and automatically downloads the created file to the root directory /

Image - Ubuntu mate 15.04 screenshot

If you have this error message Error (-53: 'Could not claim the USB device') unplug the camera from Raspberry and use the command

sudo killall gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor


then plug in the camera again and it will works.