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Satealliayesterday at 8:05 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

VladVladikofftoday at 4:14 AM

This is the kind of stuff that just makes me ok with using an iPhone. What a headache.

codethiefyesterday at 11:25 PM

If you have a Pixel and are willing to try GrapheneOS, you could also try their Camera app: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Camera

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