Notes

How to Capture a Camera Image With Python

While working on sky-color, I found that taking a photo using a webcam with python was pretty hard. opencv has some pretty opaque documentation since it’s primarily written for C developers and simplecv is dead and doesn’t support python 3. Stackoverflow is also filled with outdated incorrect answer. I therefore had to figure out a way to take a photo and save it to a file myself using python 3.6 and MacOS.

Prerequisites: Install numpy and opencv. My requirements.txt file looks like:

numpy==1.12.1
opencv-python==3.2.0.7

Code:

import time
import cv2

camera_id = 0
file_name = 'image.png'
cam = cv2.VideoCapture(camera_id)
time.sleep(1) # Give some time for the webcam to automatically adjust brightness levels
ret_val, img = cam.read()
cv2.imwrite(file_name, img)

Further reference: OpenCV API