Import from a USB stick or externalk drive via USB

MelFish

I would appreciate being able to import photos and/or videos )ignoring duplicates) from either a USB stick or an external drive connedected as a “external device” to the USB port on my computer.
At this time Tonfotos does not recognize either the USB Stick or external drive as an “external device”, although windows photos and other similar software does.
Thanks
Mel

Andrey

MelFish Seems to be duplicate request to this one: https://community.tonfotos.com/d/249-import-from-usb-stick

Or did you mean something different this time?

MelFish

As I tried using the DCIM and other methods of having the USB stick recognized as a “external device” by windows as other programs do, I thought that putting this into a formal feature request would be the proper avenue to take.

I was hoping that perhaps with you programming knowledge, it would not be too difficult for you to add this facility onto Tonfotos and it would certainly benifit all users.

I researched how USB’s with photos are detected and found these links:

https://superuser.com/questions/42022/how-does-usb-device-recognition-work
https://superuser.com/questions/87364/can-windows-tell-me-what-is-using-my-usb-drive

also the following

Everything attachable to a PC has a controller chip on it. Be it flash drives, printers, phones, keyboard, etc. That chip is acting as an identity for the device.

So when you plug an USB device (or a PCIe devices, m.2, SATA devices, LAN, WiFi, everything) the PC will ask the controller : “what are you?”

In case you plugged in a USB flash drive, then the controller will answer “Im a flash drive, 16 GB capacity, and these are the files stored in it. Do you have a driver for me?” (a driver means documents-on-how-to-use-me-so-you-can-use-me-properly)

And when the PC has it it will reply “Yes, carry on then, show me what you got”.

If not, your PC will search for drivers offline & online through internet. And if it still can’t find the driver, it will ask you to provide it. That’s why on uncommon/specialized devices the creator will give you a CD with a driver on it.

Thanks

Mel

Andrey

MelFish Thank you very much for your effort you invested into this, I appreciate it very much.

In case you want to know more about technical details, Tonfotos does not work with USB drivers directly, that would be too difficult. Instead it relies on Windows API designed specifically for that purpose - WIA. Apparently, this API is quite old and has disadvantages, such as it does not support import of videos. And there is newer API - WPD, and I have in my plans to investigate this API more closely. I don’t know yet if migration to this newer API will also help to address issue that you are bringing up - I still need to investigate that, but I guess that chances are there.

In any case, thank you for making separate thread, now other people can also chip it, if they support it, thus influencing my priorities.

MelFish

👍

Andrey

MelFish Starting from 1.9.9 Tonfotos can now import video and RAW files from cameras and phones.

Gordo

Good work. Thanks.