XCamera: Android-optimized camera widget

XCamera is a widget which extends the standard Kivy Camera widget with more functionality. In particular:

1. it displays a "shoot button", which the user can press to take pictures

2. on Android, it uses the native APIs to take high-quality pictures, including features such as auto-focus, high resolution, etc.

3. it includes a method to force landscape mode. On Android, it is often desirable to switch to landscape mode when taking pictures: you can easily do it by calling camera.force_landscape(), and later camera.resource_orientation() to restore the orientation to whatever it was before.

Screenshot:

Notes:

• On Android, the resolution property of the XCamera (and also of the plain Camera) widget controls the preview size: in other words, it only affects the quality of the preview, not the size of the pictures taken.

• As it is now, the camera will shoot using the default setting for the picture size, which seems to be what the camera think it is "the best". In theory, we could add a method to retrieve the list of all possible picture sizes, and add a property to control it. It would also be nice to add a new button to allow the user to manually select the preferred size. Pull requests are welcome :)

Install

pip install xcamera

Demo

A full working demo is available in src/main.py. You can run it via:

make run

Contribute

To play with the project, install system dependencies and Python requirements using the Makefile.

make

Then verify everything is OK by running tests.

make test