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Picamera2


Picamera2 is currently available here as a beta release. This means there may still be some issues and bugs which we shall work on fixing, and where users identify particularly useful features we may still consider implementing them. Mostly we shall be working on bugs, stability, support, examples and documentation, as well as keeping up with ongoing libcamera development. There will also be quite a strong presumption against making signficant code changes unless it seems absolutely necessary, especially any that break existing behaviour or APIs.

Picamera2 is the libcamera-based replacement for Picamera which was a Python interface to the Raspberry Pi's legacy camera stack. Picamera2 also presents an easy to use Python API.

You can find documentation here which should help you to get started.

There are also many examples in the examples folder of this repository, and some further Qt application examples in the apps folder.

Installation

Picamera2 is only supported on Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye (or later) images, both 32 and 64-bit. As of September 2022, Picamera2 is pre-installed on images downloaded from Raspberry Pi. It works on all Raspberry Pi boards right down to the Pi Zero, although performance in some areas may be worse on less powerful devices.

Picamera2 is not supported on:

On Raspberry Pi OS images, Picamera2 is now installed with all the GUI (Qt and OpenGL) dependencies. On Raspberry Pi OS Lite, it is installed without the GUI dependencies, although preview images can still be displayed using DRM/KMS. If these users wish to use the additional X-Windows GUI features, they will need to run

sudo apt install -y python3-pyqt5 python3-opengl

(No changes are required to Picamera2 itself.)

Installation using apt

apt is the recommended way of installing and updating Picamera2.

If Picamera2 is already installed, you can update it with sudo apt install -y python3-picamera2, or as part of a full system update (for example, sudo apt upgrade).

If Picamera2 is not already installed, then your image is presumably older and you should start with

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

If you have installed Picamera2 previously using pip, then you should also uninstall this (pip3 uninstall picamera2).

Thereafter, you can install Picamera2 with all the GUI (Qt and OpenGL) dependencies using

sudo apt install -y python3-picamera2

If you do not want the GUI dependencies, use

sudo apt install -y python3-picamera2 --no-install-recommends

Installation using pip

This is no longer the recommended way to install Picamera2. However, if you want to do so you can use

sudo apt install -y python3-libcamera python3-kms++
sudo apt install -y python3-pyqt5 python3-prctl libatlas-base-dev ffmpeg python3-pip
pip3 install numpy --upgrade
pip3 install picamera2[gui]

which will install Picamera2 with all the GUI (Qt and OpenGL) dependencies. If you do not want these, please use

sudo apt install -y python3-libcamera python3-kms++
sudo apt install -y python3-prctl libatlas-base-dev ffmpeg libopenjp2-7 python3-pip
pip3 install numpy --upgrade
pip3 install picamera2

Contributing

Please note that the "main" branch of this repository corresponds to the currently released version of Picamera2 so that the examples there can be referred to by users. Development for forthcoming releases happens on the "next" branch.

We are happy to receive pull requests (normally for the "next" branch) that will fix bugs, add features and generally improve the code. Pull requests should be:

pip3 install pre-commit
pre-commit install

This will install flake8 in a venv and will perform linting of changes prior to committing.

Thank you!