Hacker News

With Open Camera, my device (and seemingly many others) have phantom cameras with IDs that crash Android's camera server if accessed. When that happens I have to restart my phone. Open Camera does not have a way to blacklist those. There are several issues open about this on the issue tracker but they have been open since 2020. This is not an easy problem to fix (LineageOS uses a manually populated key called "config_ignoredAuxCameraIds" in device trees to solve this for their Aperture camera app) but at least an option to filter those out manually if I know what I'm doing would be nice.

The other two prominent open source camera apps are Fossify Camera and PhotonCamera. Fossify Camera does not support multiple lenses yet. PhotonCamera is nice because it does image processing and handles my camera lenses correctly but its UX is janky (on my device, with default settings, taking a photo takes 7-8 seconds and quitting the app before the process is complete loses the image), it's not on F-Droid and it doesn't automatically switch between lenses with zoom changes. There's also FreeDcam but I'm not a professional photographer and I'm certainly not going to buy a color calibration reference card that costs more than a hundred dollars.

It sucks that on my phone with /e/OS, instead of using a FOSS camera app, I resort to using Pixel's camera app with internet permission disabled to be able to take advantage of my hardware.

What I love in Open Camera is that I am able to turn off all extra post-processing (noise, yes please) and use my phone camera with full manual settings like it was a DSLR (with a really bad sensor). Only problems are clunky UI and general slowness of taking pictures, but you get used to it.

It's really unbeatable from a photographer / artist perspective, especially because I care a lot about imperfect gritty noisy looks and full control.

The website is almost unreadable with so many ads.

Also I think this is overkill? "The following files are used in Open Camera"

I use this on my Zenfone 8. It's...okay. The UI is pretty sub-par, but the main reason I use it is because the camera, by default, has this annoying, overly aggressive denoising filter built into it that makes everything look slightly cartoony, and there's no way to disable it with any other camera app I've tried.

I downloaded that on my spare Android phone (I'm primarily an iOS 17 user), but never ended up using it because it just wasn't aesthetically pleasant. I also don't really take photos using my Android phone, I guess.

Randomly, I wish more UI/UX designers contribute to open source.

GrapheneOS secure camera is great. https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Camera

I quite appreciate that Open Camera has a large, granular list of image resolutions. My phone's stock camera app gives me more pixels (more file size) than I usually need and also adds a ton of unnecessary metadata.

It says it's OSS, but I can't find a link to the source code in the website, am I just being dense?

No link to source and just says "The source code is available from Open Camera's SourceForge page." Why not link it?

That's how you write a title.

I've used it for several years now, it's a great app. Not perfect, there is noticeable lag to capture high resolution images, and lacks shutter speed control. Still, beats other FOSS alternatives in my experience.

Folks, if you have a page about a product that has a UI, please include images of the UI.

I'm gonna give this a try. I have a samsung and the camera app has glitchy slow motion for years. I would never buy another one again, but if i can get functioning slow motion then i can still use it at least for side projects

Would this be the iOS 'alternative'? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47010018

Open Camera can also be found on F-Droid

Funnily enough I use this just to have a camera which saves to a different directory for keeping RealityScan images apart from my general photos.

I used to use Open Camera, but I started having an issue where it would not take photos, and would just wait indefinitely for the camera to focus. It would completely lock up until I moved the phone somewhere else, pointed it at something, and waited and waited and waited for the camera to be happy about the focus, and only then would it take a photo. But this made it useless to get photos in most of the situations where I wanted photos. I couldn't find any documentation about this or settings about this; I must have gone through the entire settings tree at least five times trying to figure out why it was waiting for the camera to focus before taking a photo, but I could never figure out why, or whether it's possible to disable that.

Which camera brands / models don't phone home or have "smart" ai features built in provided over a proprietary cloud app?

It's usable but that's all I can say for it. Changing settings for simply adjusting ISO makes the processing of images take forever. I tried to use it so I could capture poorly-illuminating LEDs in a strip at work and ended up just using a DSLR in manual mode, it was much faster.

I've been using open camera on android since 2019.

It's far superior to anything I've seen natively installed on any device. It has a lot of options, which I suspect can be confusing to some, but they're worth familiarizing with.

My favorite feature is the macro, which when coupled with the right UI settings produces photos that when I have printed, result in the person saying "wow! You took that with a phone!?". And I say "yeah. Open Camera. It's great, try it sometime".

Highly recommend.

what no AI? who will replace blurry photos of my family / the moon with stock photos so they look great?

useing this on moto g15 it had, untill a moment ago, one thing I did not like which was to play a sound for starting a video recording. works, does the thing without guggle logo and chirpy blather, paired with "fossify" gallery, which is nice as I can set the background coulor of the icon to black, and have my background screen set ot a picture of something black, taken in the dark, so the center part of the icon is all that shows.

open camera is really good. we use it all the time

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