Got a little time to play with my new camera today, a Canon PowerShot S230 Elph. I think there are still about 300 features I don’t understand (what is the mic for?), but I’m starting to get a grasp on it. So far photos are turning out with about 50% consistency, but I hope to improve. Also finally downloaded pictures to my laptop successfully.

Tips so far for syncing the Canon S230 with my Debian Vaio.

  1. Use gPhoto, it seems to be what people use, and it works well.
  2. The S230 is supported! For almost a whole month! gphoto2 2.1.1 is full of stocking stuffers.
  3. However, it hasn’t hit Debian testing yet, so I had to figure out the --target-release option to apt-get; apt-get -t unstable install gphoto2 worked for me.
  4. If the auto-detect isn’t working (gphoto2 --auto-detect), you might want to make sure that your USB module is loaded (modprobeuhci), and mount your device filesystem (mount -t usbdevfs usb/proc/bus/usb). This is all documented in gphoto2’s excellent manual, which we aren’t all smart enough to read first.

Next Steps

gPhoto strongly recommends hotplug for USB permissions management.

Anyone have a recommendation for a digital photo library tool? Something like iPhoto? Probably most of my photos will end up on a webserver with gallery, but it would be nice to have something local.

Maybe if you’re lucky I’ll upload my sepiaed, panoramic shots of our drooping Douglas Fir later tonight.