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Camera

The first thing you must do in any picamzero program is create a camera.

Add these two lines of code at the start of your program:

from picamzero import Camera
cam = Camera()

The Camera in the example is called cam, but you can call yours something different if you prefer.

The camera can do three basic things:

  • show a preview
  • take a still image (photo)
  • record a video.

Camera properties

The following properties of the camera can be set. There is no need to change any of these properties if you just want a standard image.

Property Type Default Description
brightness float 0.0 A value between between -1.0 and 1.0.
contrast float 1.0 A value between 0.0 and 32.0.
exposure int None How long the exposure for a shot should be. The min and max values vary.
gain int None The analogue gain. The min and max values vary.
greyscale bool False Turn greyscale (black and white) mode on or off. Greyscale does not apply to video capture.
white_balance str "auto" The white balance profile used. This can be "auto", "tungsten", "fluorescent", "indoor", "daylight" or "cloudy".

You can also change the size of the three modes (preview, still and video):

Property Type Default Description
preview_size tuple Depends* The width and height, in pixels, of the preview window, e.g. (800, 600). Both the height and width must be even numbers and greater than 15.
still_size tuple Depends* The width and height, in pixels, of any still images. Both the height and width must be even numbers and greater than 15.
video_size tuple Depends* The width and height, in pixels, of any video captured. Both the height and width must be even numbers and greater than 15.

*The default size will depend on which Raspberry Pi camera you are using.

Change a property by giving it a value, for example:

cam.brightness = 0.5
cam.greyscale = True
cam.video_size = (1920, 1080) # 1080p

Camera methods

A method is something you can ask the camera to do.

Flip the camera (flip_camera)

Flips the orientation of the camera. You can flip along the horizontal axis, the vertical axis or both. The flip will be applied to the preview, still images and videos.

flip_camera(
    vflip: bool,
    hflip: bool
) -> None
Parameter Data type Default Compulsory? Description
vflip bool False No Flips the image vertically. Setting this to True will provide an upside-down image.
hflip bool False No Flips the image horizontally. Setting this to True will provide a mirror image.
Example
cam.flip_camera(vflip=True)

The camera image will be upside down.

Setting flip_camera more than once will mean earlier transforms are disregarded. For example:

cam.flip_camera(vflip=True)
cam.flip_camera(hflip=True)
The camera will only be flipped horizontally. The previous vflip setting is reset by the second call to the method.

There are lots more camera methods for previewing, taking photos and recording videos.