Extracting photos from Vivitar Mini Camera

See my GitHub repository on this.

We found this mini camera that can go on your keychain, a Vivitar Mini Camera, but we had no way of extracting the photos. Online tutorials only showed people using Windows XP machines to install the official software, but after some digging through online forums, I found a way to do it in an “easier” way, just on Windows 10. The photo resolution is quite bad, but it is fun to play with:

Extracting Photos on Mac

To do this, install brew, and then use brew to install gphoto2. Then you can simply run the commmand

sudo gphoto2 --auto-detect -P

to extract all photos to the current folder. They are extracted as .ppm files, so you could use (part of) the Windows script (using Pillow) to convert the images to png (or whatever format you like).

To delete the photos off the camera, run the command

sudo gphoto2 --auto-detect -D

Extracting Photos on Linux

This should effectively be the same as on Mac, just install gphoto2 and run the commands described above.

Extracting data from Vivitar Mini Camera on Windows

sudo apt install linux-tools-generic hwdata 
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/local/bin/usbip usbip /usr/lib/linux-tools/*-generic/usbip 20
  • View USB devices (in PS on windows):
usbipd wsl list
  • output:
BUSID  VID:PID    DEVICE                                                        STATE
1-1    046d:c534  USB-invoerapparaat                                            Not attached
1-2    2770:9120  USB DIGITAL STILL CAMERA                                      Attached - WSL
1-4    8087:0aa7  Intel(R) Wireless Bluetooth(R)                                Not attached
1-5    04f2:b5d5  HP TrueVision HD Camera                                       Not attached
  • Find camera bus (1-2 in example)
  • Connect USB device to WSL
usbipd wsl attach --busid <busid> --distribution <distro>
  • so in our case:
usbipd wsl attach --busid 1-2 --distribution Ubuntu
  • In WSL / Ubuntu: check USB devices lsusb Should show camera:
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 2770:9120 NHJ, Ltd Che-ez! Snap / iClick Tiny VGA Digital Camera
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
  • In WSL / Ubuntu: install gphoto2 with apt
  • cd to folder to output photos (in ppm format)
  • Extract all photos
sudo gphoto2 --auto-detect -P
  • The photos are extracted in ppm format, we can convert this to png (or any other image format you like) using Pillow in Python.
  • Delete all photos from the camera
sudo gphoto2 --auto-detect -D
By Uncategorized