Open Camera is a FOSS camera app for Android
opencamera.org.uk210 points by tetris11 5 days ago
210 points by tetris11 5 days ago
With Open Camera, my device (and seemingly many others) have phantom cameras with IDs that crash Android's camera server if accessed. When that happens I have to restart my phone. Open Camera does not have a way to blacklist those. There are several issues open about this on the issue tracker but they have been open since 2020. This is not an easy problem to fix (LineageOS uses a manually populated key called "config_ignoredAuxCameraIds" in device trees to solve this for their Aperture camera app) but at least an option to filter those out manually if I know what I'm doing would be nice.
The other two prominent open source camera apps are Fossify Camera and PhotonCamera. Fossify Camera does not support multiple lenses yet. PhotonCamera is nice because it does image processing and handles my camera lenses correctly but its UX is janky (on my device, with default settings, taking a photo takes 7-8 seconds and quitting the app before the process is complete loses the image), it's not on F-Droid and it doesn't automatically switch between lenses with zoom changes. There's also FreeDcam but I'm not a professional photographer and I'm certainly not going to buy a color calibration reference card that costs more than a hundred dollars.
It sucks that on my phone with /e/OS, instead of using a FOSS camera app, I resort to using Pixel's camera app with internet permission disabled to be able to take advantage of my hardware.
This is the kind of stuff that just makes me ok with using an iPhone. What a headache.
If you have a Pixel and are willing to try GrapheneOS, you could also try their Camera app: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Camera
There are builds of GCam which you can use as well, though if you don't want Google code on your device this isn't for you.
If you're using GrapheneOS you can disable network access for GCam to reduce the risk that Google is spying on your photos.
The postprocessing is notably better with GCam, so it's worth running on GrapheneOS imo.
What I love in Open Camera is that I am able to turn off all extra post-processing (noise, yes please) and use my phone camera with full manual settings like it was a DSLR (with a really bad sensor). Only problems are clunky UI and general slowness of taking pictures, but you get used to it.
It's really unbeatable from a photographer / artist perspective, especially because I care a lot about imperfect gritty noisy looks and full control.
The website is almost unreadable with so many ads.
Also I think this is overkill? "The following files are used in Open Camera"
You really need to start using an ad blocker. I don't see any ads at all, anywhere on the Internet. It boggles my mind that someone who reads HN does not use an ad blocker in 2026.
Oh there are still ads as some are baked into the content, but I can live with those. How people can live with the normal amount of ads - no idea.
I had a friend years ago with laser focus. He was read an article on his laptop and I was behind him. I asked him how he tolerating the flashing chumbox ad. "Why don't you install Adblock Plus (the ad blocker of the day)?". He had to look around his screen for a second to find it. He said he didn't even register it before I told him about it.
Even a single dead pixel would seriously distract me but he didn't even notice the gif of some disgusting medical scam ad showing elbows or knees or whatever.
He could also fall asleep seconds after hitting the bed. I need at least 10 minutes - at least. Sometimes an hour. Maybe it's a related phenomenon.
Some people just seem to ignore external stimuli better than others. Whether ads whose purpose is brand recognition work on them subconsciously, idk.
One aspect of that is people who have learned to ignore ads. One aspect of that is that many people do not perceive their entire screen at once.
I tend to catch almost everything on the screen when I'm taking it in, and if someone asks me about something on the screen I can generally find it in a small fraction of a second; I don't take in every last detail (e.g word of text) simultaneously, but I have every major UI element in mind. I have observed that many people are focused specifically on one thing and don't notice a thing I call attention to without searching the screen for multiple seconds.
I'm with you on that intuitive feeling of perceiving the whole screen, but I suspect something is going on for us that is closely related to human sight: just like the eye is constantly moving to account for the optic nerve blindspot and our brain seamlessly stitches things together, we're probably using our latent understanding of the functions on every part of the screen to stitch together an image/awareness-sense while our eyes actually focus on one part at a time.
When introducing non-computer people to a new application, I find it helps (or is sometimes necessary) to walk them through each part of the screen, explaining what it is for and how it relates to the others. If someone doesn't or can't retain that explanation, usually nothing will help them. But if they do/can retain it, I find even non-computer people are much quicker in noticing particular updates to the application's or OS's GUI.
The human eye only really focuses on an area about the size of one word, but moves quickly (saccades) to focus on whatever part you want to see at that moment. The rest of your vision (peripheral vision) has limited functionality to quickly guide a saccade towards any part of it, to detect changes (raisin an IRQ) and an extremely low resolution of general vision (enough to make our . You can't even read one word of text while looking at the one next to it, and if you think you can, it's because you already know what it says. Part of this effect seems to be a lower physical resolution and part of it is because your visual cortex spends its neurons interpreting the center more precisely rather than interpreting more area more loosely.
I don't think that's entirely accurate, because this can also apply to perceiving entirely new UIs you've never seen before. Familiarity helps, but I don't think it's entirely that.
> perceiving entirely new UIs
I think this experience is now rare if you are computer-adept, though it was more common even just a few decades ago. But the first thing I do when I see a totally unfamiliar UI is stare at it for a bit until I think I understand the information hierarchy. And then try to verify that understanding by clicking things. Eventually I acquire that "perceiving the screen as a whole feeling", but I still suspect that it's something resembling the human vision process generally, under the hood of conscious perception.
(To be clear, obviously the process is based on human vision; the main distinction I'm making is between the need for a focused search vs a quick whole-screen glance.)
every once in a while I click on the google feed on my phone, which instead of opening in firefox like it should opens in some chrome webview with no ublock. It is truly atrocious (and... if you don't have unlimited data, expensive too).
> Your personal data will be processed and information from your device (cookies, unique identifiers, and other device data) may be stored by, accessed by and shared with 210 partners, or used specifically by this site.
tried to visit it without ublock, I still don't see any ads at all and see no reason why there would be any, can you tell me were are the ads?
Here is a screenshot:
https://files.catbox.moe/ukxte8.png
I do have to wonder if this is a net negative. At least for me, it significantly reduces trust and respect for the website and developer, while I can't imagine the traffic produces any meaningful revenue?
Edit: Just realized it's the same ad 4 times, haha. (I think the 5th one, offscreen, was the same too.)
What's fascinating to me is it looks totally different for me when I turned off my adblocker. We are i guess targeted differently by these ad companies. https://files.catbox.moe/9einuv.png
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What's a rare pepe and how does it support the project?
I use this on my Zenfone 8. It's...okay. The UI is pretty sub-par, but the main reason I use it is because the camera, by default, has this annoying, overly aggressive denoising filter built into it that makes everything look slightly cartoony, and there's no way to disable it with any other camera app I've tried.
open camera pretty much always delivers worse results than gcam, have you tried it?
https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/p/gcam-asus-zenfo...
I downloaded that on my spare Android phone (I'm primarily an iOS 17 user), but never ended up using it because it just wasn't aesthetically pleasant. I also don't really take photos using my Android phone, I guess.
Randomly, I wish more UI/UX designers contribute to open source.
I wish developers put in the faintest amount of thought into UX instead of just throwing together the first thing they came up with.
Like, literally just add a photo of the app to your landing page. It's not rocket science.
> Like, literally just add a photo of the app to your landing page. It's not rocket science.
Heh, I still remember a time in the internet where apps had a dedicated "screenshots" page.
That was presumably a best practice when people were still on 56kbps dialup, and downloading images was expensive.
Many telcos in the world don't even support 3G anymore.
There are some initiatives for designers to contribute to OSS, like this one: https://opensourcedesign.net
Dunno how popular/successful/active it is, tho.
I wonder if we can get some UX folks to volunteer a day to review and write up improvement suggestions for various popular open source projects. I personally know bad UX when I see it, but I'm no expert on making good UX ;-)
This. I've had so many projects where I wish someone who really cared about UX could just tell me "this sucks, if you want I can help"
I suppose if someone thought this, they would not have dared saying it?
Many do make horrible UI, but would react poorly to criticism, hard to know before ..
Many programmers think they can cheat their way into designing a good UI, they just think it's just enough for you to learn and use a GUI framework, and place the widgets in a "good enough" way.
Just look at the monstruosity that is the GUI version of wget, it's the epitome of programmers with no UX background trying to make a GUI application.
there’s a gui for wget??
Handbrake ;)
wget is a download CLI tool. Handbrake is a video transcoder. I feel like I'm missing something, or just missed the joke lol.
I Googled screenshots of "wget gui" and "handbrake software", both are GUI programs with a whole lot of dropdowns, checkboxes, etc.
Maybe that's the meaning of the parent comment?
Handbrake is aesthetically better, if slightly less powerful compared to MeGUI, but MeGUI is usable if one doesn't mind reading through some video encoding guides.
Whatever came before MeGUI was likely much worse.
You're wishing for a very double-edged sword. UI designers do as much harm as good. Disappearing scroll bars, rounded window corners for square content, hiding primary functionality inside a hamburger menu when there's plenty of room for labeled buttons, removing maximize/minimize buttons in favor of non-discoverable keyboard shortcuts.. I'm sure I'm forgetting lots, and that's just on GNOME.
As a rule, if you, a non-UI designer, are bothered by it, then it doesn't take a UI designer to fix it.
More than anything, I wish UI designers would work really hard on V1.0 and then leave it alone. There is nothing worse than having things move around on stuff you have been using for years, especially if you use it professionally. Add the new options at the end of the ribbon MS. While you are at it, don't make the menu items suddenly bigger so they look good on my big monitor, but then hide some of them when I use my laptop (that they fitted ok on last week). Don't move the account menu from the top to the bottom Reddit. I think that is one reason I keep coming back to hn. The UI has been the same the whole time I have been here
GrapheneOS secure camera is great. https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Camera
Also check out the one by LineageOS: https://github.com/LineageOS/android_packages_apps_Aperture
What makes it secure? (There's no readme, and it just links to GrapheneOS homepage.)
By default, doesn't save metadata to images.
Always saves metadata to videos.
Doesn't request or need media/storage permissions. Defaults to no location permissions.
So good - but room for improvement?
Additionally all grapheneOS built in apps are going to be as compliant as possible with all of the app sandboxing and hardening features. Like mte, dcl, etc.
I quite appreciate that Open Camera has a large, granular list of image resolutions. My phone's stock camera app gives me more pixels (more file size) than I usually need and also adds a ton of unnecessary metadata.
It says it's OSS, but I can't find a link to the source code in the website, am I just being dense?
They seem to try very hard not to link to the repo. The website mentions "Open Camera's SourceForge page", which Google finds at: https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/code/ci/master/tree/
No link to source and just says "The source code is available from Open Camera's SourceForge page." Why not link it?
I couldn’t find it at first, but it is there on SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/code/ci/master/tree/app...
That's how you write a title.
I've used it for several years now, it's a great app. Not perfect, there is noticeable lag to capture high resolution images, and lacks shutter speed control. Still, beats other FOSS alternatives in my experience.
Folks, if you have a page about a product that has a UI, please include images of the UI.
I'm gonna give this a try. I have a samsung and the camera app has glitchy slow motion for years. I would never buy another one again, but if i can get functioning slow motion then i can still use it at least for side projects
It depends on the phone camera API. Some allow up to some fps and the highest option is available through some vendor API that's not public. At least on mine.
The problem with the slow motion isn't the software, it's the phone.
Source: I have a Samsung phone. Any software trying to take slow-motion video glitches out. The camera also tends to make the phone overheat.
Would this be the iOS 'alternative'? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47010018
The pre-iOS 26 native camera app is good enough for me, and I really like Live Photos, which most alternatives don't handle.
I had a one-time purchase to Halide, but it somehow stopped working in early 2025 because Halide support claimed that the app's feature unlock (used to be one-time upfront purchase, now IAP) only works if I'm logged into the App Store account I purchased it from.
From description in Appstore:
*Please note: Halide is not free. We do offer a 7-day free trial for annual memberships. Don't like subscriptions? You can also buy the app outright with a single in-app purchase.*
Is that what you did?
I bought Halide v1, which was an upfront purchase.
They grandfathered all existing v1 purchasers, but the grandfathering somehow stopped working for me because I didn't buy it on my primary App Store account (I switch between regions, but pay for my non-free apps using my US account because they're usually cheaper).
Open Camera can also be found on F-Droid
Funnily enough I use this just to have a camera which saves to a different directory for keeping RealityScan images apart from my general photos.
That really should be a standard setting for camera apps.
If only the average person wasn't afraid of a directory tree...
It wouldn't quite solve it: the issue is it's very helpful to hit a button on my phones home screen to get "different directory" immediately via a different shortcut.
Like there's a fair bit of ergonomics here which I'm brute forcing by just having two camera apps.
I used to use Open Camera, but I started having an issue where it would not take photos, and would just wait indefinitely for the camera to focus. It would completely lock up until I moved the phone somewhere else, pointed it at something, and waited and waited and waited for the camera to be happy about the focus, and only then would it take a photo. But this made it useless to get photos in most of the situations where I wanted photos. I couldn't find any documentation about this or settings about this; I must have gone through the entire settings tree at least five times trying to figure out why it was waiting for the camera to focus before taking a photo, but I could never figure out why, or whether it's possible to disable that.
You might have enabled the "Focus Macro" mode, which gives better pictures but requires a steady hand and patience
Which camera brands / models don't phone home or have "smart" ai features built in provided over a proprietary cloud app?
Google Pixel with GrapheneOS
This is the correct answer. Anything proprietary phones home and inserts malicious metadata into pictures that allow others (social media) to know who, when and how the photo was taken.
You can even use the proprietary Pixel Camera on GrapheneOS and just deny network permissions, or if you’re worried about IPC (if you have another networked Google app installed) it can be in its own private space. And then just strip the exif data if you want before sending it anywhere.
It's usable but that's all I can say for it. Changing settings for simply adjusting ISO makes the processing of images take forever. I tried to use it so I could capture poorly-illuminating LEDs in a strip at work and ended up just using a DSLR in manual mode, it was much faster.
Well of course a DSLR will be better than a phone camera for most things, since you can control more features. That's also the point of OpenCamera; get as much controls as you can back, compared to the stock app that might be lacking. It wont do miracles if your phone camera is not good to begin with.
I've found OpenCam to be useful because of the various optional features ( onionskin, levelmeter, locking settings ). You can also set the bitrate/size/duration of videos, etc. Lots of useful stuff.
That's a weird bug. For me it always works almost instantly with the exception of long exposures where it sometimes takes 2x the exposure time.
Did you switch to Camera2 API in settings>Camera Api ?
Yes, I tried every improvement and API switch suggested for almost a month with no change in performance unless I went back to default everything, which then brought processing performance in-line with the regular native phone app.
And the Long Exposure was the primary thing I wanted it to work for.
Yeah, I agree. I've used it until 3 days ago, then after ~1y I got tired of taking the occasional pictures with HDR on and waiting 3-5 minutes for them to be processed and saved, while producing 3 other copies in the gallery.
Quality looked amazing, but the pre-installed phone camera gets close enough and it's instant.
I've been using open camera on android since 2019.
It's far superior to anything I've seen natively installed on any device. It has a lot of options, which I suspect can be confusing to some, but they're worth familiarizing with.
My favorite feature is the macro, which when coupled with the right UI settings produces photos that when I have printed, result in the person saying "wow! You took that with a phone!?". And I say "yeah. Open Camera. It's great, try it sometime".
Highly recommend.
What phone do you have?
I havent tried Open Camera in a while, but my conclusion is that the phone's camera app is best.
Unable to afford a Google-free phone, I strictly use Moto, which with a bit of adb work and a lot of disabling shitware, gets close to actual Android. They also have excellent glass, aside from doing all I require of them.
I see criticism of Open Cam already, but I recommend trying it, with patience, and seeing what it can do. All my art images, all my videos, are all taken with open camera.
Edit: for the macro setting, it allows fine tuning, but the manual focus and manual zoom functions are superb for my purposes.
Edit2: Maybe irrelevant, but I always disable the stock camera and anything camera related. Not sure if that helps, but I know I don't want any fucking thing to do with shitware, so go as nuclear as possible.
Dismissing the stock apps as "shitware" without bothering to try them or offer specific examples of areas where Opencam is better does not inspire confidence in your opinions.
Full manual controls does not mean "better". I've been a photographer for more than 20 years using everything from fully-manual (no battery) film setups through modern mirrorless bodies. I know the tradeoffs between shutter speed, ISO, and aperture, I know how to manual focus.
....and most of the time I don't want any of those, especially on a phone, where I want a clear photo of a stationary object and the phone's automatic settings get it right the first time.
If something allows full manual controls but takes two seconds longer to be ready to shoot it is significantly worse as a camera for most of my use cases.
I'm not asking for confidence. Folks can use their own critical thinking and judgement. I expressed sincerity. Some concur, some don't. I'm not trying and will not try to please everyone.
The current state of software is to some, myself, deeply offensive and many have passionate opposition to it. If you are into stockware, you won't ever find me in your way. But you'll not bully me into not expressing my opinion either. Shitware defines it perfectly to the very type of person bothering to use Fdroid and freedom respecting devices.
What dark patterns is the Pixel Camera app using, or what bad things is it doing with my data? In what way is my camera app infringing on my freedom? "It was written by company X I don't like" is not an answer - why should I replace my camera app specifically?
One negative of the Pixel camera app is that it forces Google Photos as the gallery app, even if Google Photos is disabled or not installed on the phone. I think there is a third-party shim app that essentially redirects requests to Google Photos towards whatever gallery app is set as default, but that should not be necessary.
@Arainach - Because the option to reply is disabled:
I am not sure, as I haven't used that app. What I can say, which may or may not be relevant to you is as follows:
1) Open any Google based device and do the equivalent of /Settings/System/DeveloperOptions/RunningServices/GooglePlayServices
You can peruse around just Running Services if you please, and see plenty there, but be sure to view Show Cached Processes too.
Under Play Services, you will see approximately 24 services, some reasonable, some not. Crisis Alert, Emergency Services, Vestiges of Contact Tracing rebranded, etc.
Try using Google Maps without BT and WiFi scanning, and just pure GPS. Maps won't work.
Try disabling Google Play services, or Play Store and watch Fdroid apps break, and the phone malfunction.
2) Go to /Settings/Apps/See All/Show System and behold a plethora of verified shitware, much of which cannot be removed even through ABD.
Then ask yourself Why? Most of these services are unnecessary. You, presumably, purchased, rather than leased or rented your device. So why can you cannot decide what runs on it? Many do not care. I do. I get zero reimbursement for this data mining shitware.
...or me, I say, if they need that shitware running so badly, buy their own phone and stick it where ever they want, but not on my person. We have entered a paradigm where everyone thinks Because They Can, they can just do whatever they choose on the devices of others. And what happens? We get stronger and stronger devices while the landfills engorge with waste, so that we can support a metadata whorehouse on our personal devices. If you support that, I do not oppose you, I oppose it on my system, as do others, which are the type of people I tend to direct such comments to.
No offense was intended. A comment above drops in merely to say Open Cam 'kinda sucks'. I do not downvote it, nor do I agree. I just carry on.
Is it really as good as Google Camera at computational photography; noise reduction, night mode, deblurring, stacking, etc.? That would be very impressive.
No. It actually kinda sucks.
Its the same way that the Pinephone is "usable" but really, it sucks.
Depends on specific purpose and values. And it's a simple installation away from empirical validation.
Edit: one feature I'm fond of, when posting images on the Internet, is disabling exif data. I don't always want to put my coordinates on the Internet.
Disclaimer: I last used it years ago.
My experience was that while it was great with all the features, the photo quality simply was worse than the stock manufacturer app in newer phones. Only in my old Samsung Galaxy S5 was the quality on par.
Yes, by all means, everyone should try and compare.
what no AI? who will replace blurry photos of my family / the moon with stock photos so they look great?
useing this on moto g15 it had, untill a moment ago, one thing I did not like which was to play a sound for starting a video recording. works, does the thing without guggle logo and chirpy blather, paired with "fossify" gallery, which is nice as I can set the background coulor of the icon to black, and have my background screen set ot a picture of something black, taken in the dark, so the center part of the icon is all that shows.
open camera is really good. we use it all the time
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