[alirov]

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.

[bochoh]

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!

[alirov]

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.

[hellweaver666]

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.

[alirov]

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.

[hitsurume]

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?

[alirov]

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.

[xd1936]

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

[alirov]

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.

[Toadsoup]

How do you get the pictures transferred to the pi?

[alirov]

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.