camshot: You didn’t think it was possible

But it is: You can pull images from a webcam straight from the console, without ever needing any kind of graphical interface. Pictures, or it didn’t happen:

 

And the inaugural webcam image from this machine is … the ceiling. 😐

Come to think of it, up until now, I never had a webcam … except maybe if I was fixing someone else’s computer. So something like camshot has never come into play.

It looks like camshot hasn’t seen any attention in the past few years, but that didn’t keep it from working.

By default camshot dumps its output into /tmp, which is adjustable, as are a few other options. As far as I can tell though, it only supports .bmp file formats, but it shouldn’t take you too much effort to get them converted.

What’s the use of camshot? That’s for you to decide. But I like the idea of combining this with an ssh session for a remote camera service.

Or looping through it, every second or two, for a kind of primitive stop-action remote-control camera.

Or just for tinkering. 😉