The main camera manager window is where you can control shooting and settings. Along the toolbar are buttons to start a new shooting session, open an existing sessions, show/hide the settings panel, shoot a photo, control the display zoom level and go fullscreen. On the left hand side of the screen there are 100's of controls for changing camera settings. In the future this control set will be customizable to allow infrequently used settings to be hidden, and important ones prioritized. The thumbnails along the bottom show images captured so far. The diagonal stripe across the image is just to illustrate colour management in effect. In real usage this won't be there.
If you don't have any cameras connected then there isn't really much you can do with the application. The main camera manager window UI will be in a disabled state, this dialog is displayed allowing a camera to be selected. If you see this then you really ought to plug in the USB cable and turn on camera.
When starting the application it will automatically connect to a camera if only one is present. If there are multiple cameras available, it will display a choice rather than trying to pick on your behalf. This display is also available from the File menu, should it be neccessary to switch to another camera on the fly. Not all cameras support USB triggered image capture. This Nikon dSLR does, but the Canon point-and-shoot isn't much use.
Recent Linux GNOME desktops have a plugin which automatically mounts any camera as a filesystem on the desktop. Unfortunately that prevents this application from using the camera. If this happens you'll see a dialog like this one. The solution is simple, unmount the camera filesystem and retry. In the future we'll offer todo this automatically
Some cameras may take a while to initialize with gPhoto, particularly if there are a lot of images on the memory card. For any operation take is likely to take a long time, a progress bar will be displayed along with a button to allow cancellation. Note that cancellation may not be honoured immediately though.
Sometimes when shooting it is useful to have a larger view of previous shots visible for direct comparison. The thumbnails are a little too small for this purpose. By dragging a thumbnail out of the main window it turns into a tearoff "polaroid". This can be resized & moved at will to allow large side-by-side comparisons of many images. A large monitor helps tremendously here.
The basic folder preferences control what directory is used for storing sessions. Each session gets a folder, and images shot during that session are saved into the folder using an auto incrementing filename.
Colour management is of course crucial when shooting and viewing images. The default application settings will enable colour management if the monitor profile is auto-detected. These preferences allow the profiles for the working colourspace and monitor to be overriden.
The gphoto library provides a short overview of all the capabilities supported by the connected camera. This dialog is displaying that information
The about dialog isn't the most interesting part of the application, but here it is showing the logo in all its glory