Shooting tethered with the Nikon D80 and Ubuntu

I really like shooting tethered with Lightroom and my MacBook, but today while thinking about a band shoot I had coming up, I wondered how easy it would be to do the same on Ubuntu on my Nokia Booklet.

After a bit of Googling I came across a post that had a nice and simple script that I could use as a starting point. It even calls itself via gphoto2 while working which is a nice solution to the problem of needing a script for downloading and another one for viewing the images (the hook script provided to gphoto2).

It has one problem however: I shoot RAW and therefore would need for whatever image viewer I call to be able to display NEF files. I know of no such tool for Ubuntu, so I switched my D80 to shoot RAW+JPEG instead and edited the script to this:

#!/bin/bash

case "$ACTION" in
download)
  if [ $(expr match "$ARGUMENT" '.*\.JPG$') -gt 0 ]; then
    killall eog
    eog -f "$ARGUMENT" &
  fi
  ;;
"")
  me=$(cd ${0%/*} && echo $PWD/${0##*/})
  gphoto2 --capture-tethered --hook-script=$me
  ;;
esac

Only the download branch of the case statement is edited. I just check if the filename ends in .JPG, and call eog to display the image if it does. The .NEF files are downloaded too, they’re just ignored.

The downside to this is that I can’t seem to be able to leave the images on the card as well as download them, in --capture-tethered mode gphoto2 always deletes them. But still, this is a workable solution for when I don’t have the MacBook handy.