About this document

Mission statement, history and options for the future

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity.

Calvin, in one of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes comic strips

This document is called The gPhoto2 Manual. You can get it from the gphoto homepage, found in at least one of these places: http://gphoto.org/, http://gphoto.com/, http://gphoto.sf.net/.

Mission statement.  The gPhoto2 Manual intends to be a comprehensive source of information helping users and developers to get more value out of the gPhoto2 software suite (i.e. libgphoto2, gphoto2 CLI interface, gtkam).

Document history.  Hans Ulrich Niedermann first wrote a few text files of user documentation for gphoto2. Then shortly before the 2.0 release, Tim Waugh wrote the man pages in Docbook XML. Then Hans Ulrich Niedermann migrated the text files into the XML file and began with general improvements. Then after the 2.1.0 release, Michael J. Rensing joined us with gtkam documentation. Marcus Meissner improved documentation with the new options after the 2.4 release series.

Ideas for the future.  The following ideas are just ideas, not mandatory policy.

  1. Add the FAQ, a gtkam manual, the older developer docs and the current autogenerated source code documentation in convenient places.
  2. Improve the document structure.
  3. Create a pure ASCII text version of specific parts (like e. g. installation FAQs, compilation FAQs etc.) for inclusion into the respective distributions.

Credits.  The editors want to thank all those who gave us feedback and suggestions about this manual, including (but not limited to) Mikko Hänninen, Andreas Klemm, Matthias Schuendehuette, Cosmin Stroe, and all the others whom we didn't list here (mail us if you want your name mentioned here).