When ctypes comes to the rescue

I recently purchased a DSLR (Canon 1000D) and almost at the same time I read an article about remote controlling your camera using gphoto. I tried it out and thought it was cool. During the holidays I had some time over to spend on hacking and wanted to try controlling my camera from Python. To my disappointment there were no Python bindings included with Ubuntu for gphoto. I did some googling but couldn't find any pre-compiled bindings, what to do?

Well, I could always try doing it with ctypes.

From the docs:

ctypes is a foreign function library for Python. It provides C compatible data types, and allows calling functions in DLLs or shared libraries. It can be used to wrap these libraries in pure Python.

Note: I haven't done any serious stuff with ctypes nor gphoto before so if you find any errors etc please post a comment.

It amazed my how easy it is to use ctypes. Here's a snippet that will take a picture (from the first camera found), download the image to local storage and then delete it from the camera's storage.

import ctypes
import os

# gphoto structures
""" From 'gphoto2-camera.h'
typedef struct {
        char name [128];
        char folder [1024];
} CameraFilePath;
"""
class CameraFilePath(ctypes.Structure):
    _fields_ = [('name', (ctypes.c_char * 128)),
                ('folder', (ctypes.c_char * 1024))]

# gphoto constants
# Defined in 'gphoto2-port-result.h'
GP_OK = 0
# CameraCaptureType enum in 'gphoto2-camera.h'
GP_CAPTURE_IMAGE = 0
# CameraFileType enum in 'gphoto2-file.h'
GP_FILE_TYPE_NORMAL = 1

# Load library
gp = ctypes.CDLL('libgphoto2.so.2')

# Init camera
context = gp.gp_context_new()
camera = ctypes.c_void_p()
gp.gp_camera_new(ctypes.pointer(camera))
gp.gp_camera_init(camera, context)

# Capture image
cam_path = CameraFilePath()
gp.gp_camera_capture(camera,
                     GP_CAPTURE_IMAGE,
                     ctypes.pointer(cam_path),
                     context)

# Download and delete
cam_file = ctypes.c_void_p()
fd = os.open('image.jpg', os.O_CREAT | os.O_WRONLY)
gp.gp_file_new_from_fd(ctypes.pointer(cam_file), fd)
gp.gp_camera_file_get(camera,
                      cam_path.folder,
                      cam_path.name,
                      GP_FILE_TYPE_NORMAL,
                      cam_file,
                      context)
gp.gp_camera_file_delete(camera,
                         cam_path.folder,
                         cam_path.name,
                         context)
gp.gp_file_unref(cam_file)

# Release the camera
gp.gp_camera_exit(camera, context)
gp.gp_camera_unref(camera)

Ok, remember that I haven't done any wrapper or anything, it almost looks like 'C' code. I have also skipped all error checking for brevity.

You can always use a c_void_p if you don't need access to the data in Python (if you only need to pass a pointer between foreign functions). I'm using c_void_p instead of defining ctypes structures for gphoto's data types such as Camera and CameraFile. I still had to define CameraFilePath since I needed access to the data in Python.

I really like ctypes because I don't have to maintain code in C to access native functionality. Maybe you won't get the same performance as with traditional bindings but in this particular case it's not an issue.