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Posted by
2021-09-30
Version 1.49.1
Version 1.49.1 is released!
- Open Camera now supports portrait and landscape system orientations, rather than being locked to landscape system orientation.[1]
- Improved performance when opening the camera and clicking on the gallery icon (mainly relevant for using Storage Access Framework with Android 10+ when save folder has large number of files).[2]
- Video subtitles on Android 11 now requires Settings/More camera controls/"Storage Access Framework" enabled.[3]
- Corrected manual white balance (previously this wasn't working like manual white balance is meant to at all).
- Fixed immersive mode on Android 11.
- Fixed video subtitles when restarting due to max filesize.
- Support longer exposure time on some Samsung Galaxy S devices.
- Improvements for NR, DRO and HDR photo modes.
- Updated some user interface icons.
- Various other bug fixes.
See http://opencamera.org.uk/history.html for a full changelog.
[1] I wanted to mention why Open Camera previously locked to landscape, since in recent times this has become one of the most common complaints, with people even viewing it as a bug. Android has always supported applications being able to lock to portrait or landscape, and many camera applications locked the orientation (especially in the past - e.g., the Galaxy stock camera used to lock to portrait). This was done for performance, to avoid a disruptive rotation (which is fine for most applications, but less so for a camera). The rotation in Open Camera v1.49.1 is pretty quick (especially if using Camera2 API), but remember devices weren't as fast years ago when I started writing Open Camera! Also some APIs are used to make this work better which aren't available in Android 4.0.
The other thing that's changed is that locking to landscape wasn't always a problem. With Android 4.0, running fullscreen meant you couldn't easily tell that it was locked to landscape. But gradually parts of the Android UI has started to seep through despite being fullscreen: being able to show or pull the status bar down, or PIP, not to mention possible complications with foldables.
Another reason that may have affected Open Camera is the choice to lock to landscape. It seemed that in 2013, people took their photos and videos in landscape. Now we have the widespread trend of using cameras in portrait (even when landscape would be much more suitable for the scene!) So even though many camera applications locked the rotation, many chose to lock to portrait which may have been less obvious.
So there were reasons for locking the orientation, but now is the time to support different orientations.
[2] This is related to the problems plaguing Android 10's scoped storage (see https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/blog/2020/12/open-camera-and-scoped-storage/ ). As noted in that link, a rather annoying behaviour with scoped storage is that if an application saves using the Storage Access Framework API, then Open Camera can only see those files using the Storage Access Framework API. Which, as other developers have noted, sucks for performance. This meant that if you had 1000s of files on the save location, it could take over a second or more to find the latest thumbnail to display in the gallery icon! I haven't been able to fix that, but I have made it so this is less of a problem. (Although I already did this on a background thread, the opening of the camera was previously queued until after we got the thumbnail, now they run in parallel; and Open Camera now does more to remember the previous thumbnail after taking a photo.)
[3] Sorry about that, but this is yet another scoped storage issue, although one affecting Android 11. The mediastore API now only seems to support a minimal number of recognised file types (so to save in the Videos folder, it has to be a recognised video file, and Android doesn't recognise .SRT files). Attempting to do so results in them being renamed e.g. to .srt.mp4.
2021-09-30
Anonymous
thanks :) i love this app
http://opencamera.org.uk/history.html
Hello Mark-H, Marc W. here.
Unfortunately my girlfriend just seems to have lost a month's worth of photos shot with OpenCamera including our Christmas pics, which we are obviously not happy about.
After upgrading Android from 10 to 11 - which had also resulted in a loss of most of her media data including photos, fortunately having been backed up before - we couldn't use the old DCIM/OpenCamera folder anymore, it just wouldn't work, probably due to that Google scoped storage shxt... So I created a folder called OpenCamera2 and set it as target in the app, as well as activating Storage Access Framework.
But yesterday we accidentally pressed the video button in the app for the first time since the upgrade. What happened then still leaves me speechless (as does the massive data loss after the OS upgrade to this day, wtf was Google thinking?!), as all pictures in the new folder had simply vanished! Long after the system upgrade! For a day they were still visible in the Google Photos app as thumbnails, but after a phone restart (which was recommended as a solution to vanished content somewhere on the web, yeah right) now they're gone completely, with no chance of recovery I guess.
So it seems there are still some issues with your scoped storage handling there. Maybe the fact that our SD card was formatted as internal storage (which is a regular system feature so why not use it? I only just found out that this seems to cause trouble as well) may have been a contributing factor.
Still, not happy.
Phone's a Nokia 4.2 btw., mostly Google free, so no cloud backups.
What we've learned is: a monthly manual backup still isn't enough.
Regards, Marc W.
Sorry to hear this. I guess as a last resort, try a File Manager application to see if any files are still on there (and just not seen by gallery applications).
I don't know what would cause photos to be deleted afterwards (either due to upgrading Android, or later on). Usually any bugs on Open Camera's side would be failing to save in the first place - once they're saved, they're standard files on the device (and Open Camera doesn't even have code for deleting saved files other than the special case of the user choosing to delete a photo that was just taken).
May comara Error not opan