raspistill is the command line tool for capturing still photographs with a Raspberry Pi camera module.
With a camera module connected and enabled, enter the following command in the terminal to take a picture:
raspistill -o cam.jpg
In this example the camera has been positioned upside-down. If the camera is placed in this position, the image must be flipped to appear the right way up.
With the camera placed upside-down, the image must be rotated 180° to be displayed correctly. The way to correct for this is to apply both a vertical and a horizontal flip by passing in the -vf and -hf flags:
raspistill -vf -hf -o cam2.jpg
Now the photo has been captured correctly.
The camera module takes pictures at a resolution of 2592 x 1944 which is 5,038,848 pixels or 5 megapixels.
A photo taken with the camera module will be around 2.4MB. This is about 425 photos per GB.
Taking 1 photo per minute would take up 1GB in about 7 hours. This is a rate of about 144MB per hour or 3.3GB per day.
You can create a Bash script which takes a picture with the camera. To create a script, open up your editor of choice and write the following example code:
#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M")
raspistill -vf -hf -o /home/pi/camera/$DATE.jpgThis script will take a picture and name the file with a timestamp.
You'll also need to make sure the path exists by creating the camera folder:
mkdir cameraSay we saved it as camera.sh, we would first make the file executable:
chmod +x camera.shThen run with:
./camera.shFor a full list of possible options, run raspistill with no arguments. To scroll, redirect stderr to stdout and pipe the output to less:
raspistill 2>&1 | lessUse the arrow keys to scroll and type q to exit.
Full documentation of the camera can be found at hardware/camera.