PiCameras are amazing pieces of hardware with a software that could probably be managed better.
The original PiCamera libraries haven’t seen a commit in 4 years, as they were deprecated with the Bullseye release. I can still run some code that uses that library on some old #RaspberryPi just because I’m keeping them on some ancient version of Raspbian. Otherwise, raspistill and friends break in many possible ways both on both Bullseye and Bookworm, and the package doesn’t even install on Arch ARM because raspberrypi-firmware is now gone.
A couple of years down the line, and its replacement, PiCamera2, is still in beta. It can be installed through a relatively smooth process only on the last two versions of RPi OS via apt, and it’s otherwise very hard to get installed on any other distro - on Arch it depends on packages that officially aren’t even available for ARM (like python-av), when installed via pip it tries to build the world even if some packages (like numpy) are already installed on the system, and I didn’t manage to get it to run on Ubuntu because of permission issues.
It’s really a pity because a vibrant ecosystem of camera apps and scripts had been written using the old version of PiCamera, which could do a lot of things with very low entry barriers. Then a sudden deprecation was announced without a viable alternative, and a couple of years down the line that alternative isn’t quite stable yet. I’ve eventually resorted to leverage the native v4l2 integration over ffmpeg as a cross-platform workaround, but that moves most of the burden to the CPU and I’m not really leveraging this hardware at its best, plus it probably raises the technical bar for a lot of hobbyist makers.
Why was something so important to many users deprecated without any stable alternative on the horizon?
@fabio Because the author of picamera stopped supporting it? Wasn't our decision. The original picamera library wasn't written, or supported, by Raspberry Pi. The new picamera2 library was written in-house, and is extensively documented, https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/camera/picamera2-manual.pdf. It might not do what you want (yet), but it's being actively maintained and worked on.
@aallan@fabio I've found it incredibly easy to use as you can use old 3rd party camera v1's and the latest v3's with the same python code. The extra settings and great documentation make up for what was lost with picamera for me.
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