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 & Usage

xcamera is available on PyPI. Therefore it can be installed via pip.

pip3 install --user xcamera

Once installed, the demo should be available in your PATH and can be ran from the command line.

xcamera

And the widget can be imported via:

from kivy_garden.xcamera import XCamera

Demo

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

make run

Develop & 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

If you're familiar with Docker, the project can also run in a fully isolated container. First build the image.

make docker/build

Then you can run tests within the container.

make docker/run/test

Or the application itself.

make docker/run/app