Advice on RPi taking high res pictures at timed intervals

Question

I'm working on a project with my Raspberry Pi at the moment. I'll give a brief summary of what I'm trying to achieve.

1. I would like my RPi to take high resolution pictures through a USB webcam at intervals, say every 5 minutes
2. I would then like to upload each image into the web, preferably to my Dropbox account (Possible?)
3. I will then set the desktop background settings of my Windows 7 machine to look in the directory where these images are stored
4. End result: I can set the RPi up on the farm where I grew up so my desktop background will keep me up to date on what's going on up there while I'm stuck behind my desk at work wondering why I didn't become a farmer!

Sound like a fun idea?

So my question at this stage in my project is about your experience with cameras that work well with the RPi and what I should look for the get the highest res possible out of it. Also if anyone knows of any good software for taking picture at intervals that would be useful too! I have read about the 'motion' app but it seems to have issues with high resolution.

All advice/ ideas will be highly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can check if your camera is in the list of working hardware (not a complete list), to make sure it will work: http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals

For working with the camera and taking snapshots etc. you could use motion

Regarding loading the images to an webserver or dropbox: It should be doable to write a small Phyton script to load images onto a web/ftp server. Or you could make your Raspberry Pi accessible from the web / use it as a webserver (for example nginx)

Answer 2

i use gphoto2 package (commandline shoot) with Raspi to shoot (by usb) every X seconds with a Canon DSLR camera and upload it to a local web server. so later, make time lapse videos with it.

Answer 3

Definitely use gphoto2. Here is a great script for installing gphoto2 on the pi: https://github.com/gonzalo/gphoto2-updater/

Note that you can email to a dropbox, so if the Pi is connected to the internet you could have your script email each image capture using mpack.

Answer 4

I'd wait for the 5-megapixel official camera module if I were you.

Answer 5

I use the dropbox_uploader script. I made a simple photo-capture script which writes to /var/tmp, a fake directory in the memory instead of the sdcard, to reduce sd-card wear! My own script.sh

#!/bin/bash
filename="shot-`date +%s`.jpg"
tmpdir="/var/tmp/"
dropboxfolder="/webcam/"
#Take a picture usinusingg a command which works for your camera, save it to $filename
/home/pi/Dropbox-Uploader/dropbox_uploader.sh -s -q upload $tmpdir$filename $dropboxfolder$filename
/bin/rm $tmpdir$filename

Then chmod +x script.sh and edit /etc/crontab, add the line
*/5 * * * * pi /home/pi/script.sh
(edit to your filename/locations ofcourse)

It works perfect for me.