Canon Capture

Capture is a tool for periodic image capturing with digital Canon cameras. It is licensed under GPL and it was developed for Linux. Although there were some attempts to port the underlying libptp to MacOS, i do not know if this effort was successful.

The program is command-line oriented: the commands can be specified as command line parameters (useful for scripting) or can be entered in an interactive mode. It can take a shot, set various properties of the camera, open a viewfinder window (works like a webcam) and save viewfinder images.

The main advantage of Capture compared to gPhoto is that the consecutive shots are taken without the camera lenses being closed and opened again. When taking several thousands shots in a row, this indeed makes the camera live longer. If you do not need this feature, you will happily live with gPhoto.