Burst capture photos in gphoto2 on Linux

Question

Not sure where this best belongs: photography, electronics, software, or here. I have a Canon PowerShot G9 camera and I am using gphoto2 on Linux to control it over USB.

I need to take photos continuously and copy them to the computer (asynchronously is fine, so photos could be taken at maximum speed and transfers could queue up).

With gphoto2, I can do continuous capture like this:

gphoto2 --capture-image -F <frames> -I <seconds>

This gives me at best 4 seconds between captures (0.25 fps). If I unplug the camera and use its burst mode, I can take shots at 0.8 fps. I don't seem to be able to change the burst setting when plugged in with gphoto2. I tried some sample code that uses libgphoto2 directly in C, but that was even slower. How can I accomplish faster capture with this camera, or what cameras would let me do this?

Answer 1

Try Burst mode:

gphoto2 --set-config viewfinder=1 --set-config capturemode='Burst' --set-config burstnumber=5 --set-config capturetarget=1 --capture-image-and-download --force-overwrite