Erik Rothoff Andersson

I have been quite bored lately. When you are bored you want to make things. One thing I have always wanted to do is programmatically take a photo (that means to have my code use the built-in camera to take photos and use in my application) using my Mac’s built in iSight-camera for some fun manipulation.

A simple search on Google returns some outdated results on old programs and other stuff related to capturing video using old APIs. However, when I recently dove into QTKit (QuickTime’s API) I found some promising things.

This post will be a straightforward demo of how to grab photos from your iSight camera (or any other connected cameras). I’ll post some code and explain the different steps and what they mean. And… The best parts about reading tutorials on QTKit and using the computers camera are that you get to see a lot of random pictures by the demoer himself. And here is my contribution: I.e, what you should have at the end of this tutorial.

Doing this you notice how silly you look while compiling code.

Prerequisites

You should know some Objective-C, how to use XCode and have some basic knowledge of Cocoa (or Cocoa touch, for iOS, but this code will not work on iOS)

Code

The first thing you have to do is include the QTKit-framework in your Xcode-project. While your at it you’ll need the QuartzCore-framework too (for image processing). Adding frameworks in Xcode 4 is a bit different from 3. You press the project name in the file navigator and there you get a list of frameworks for your project. Adding is simply pressing the +-sign and finding your framework.

To keep this simple I’ll just post a working code sample with lots and lots of comments.

This class presents you with an easy interface for grabbing photos. As illustrated: