Get files from specified digital camera

Question

I would like to copy then delete the images from my digital cameras. There are 3 digital camera to connected to the pc via USB.

The pc sees these devices and add them as drives. I could copy the images from the drive, just I have to know whe do I copy the images from. Drive of the camera can change. It depends on which camera will be read and added earlier to the pc.

How should I indentify the cameras and copy the files from them.

Answer 1

Dealing with them in terms of them being removable disks is relatively easy, firstly finding the removable disks using DriveInfo

// Find removable disks
var drives = DriveInfo.GetDrives().Where(x => x.DriveType == DriveType.Removable && x.IsReady);

List<FileInfo[]> pictureHandles = new List<FileInfo[]>();

// Find all files of a certain type on each drive
foreach(var drive in drives)
{
    pictureHandles.Add(
                new DirectoryInfo(drive.Name)
                .GetFiles("*.jpg",SearchOption.AllDirectories)
                .ToArray());
}

// Do stuff with pictureHandles and identify
// which drive is which camera using System.Management

Identifying the cameras themselves will be more complicated. Only you will know exactly how to identify them, but I would suggest using WMI via System.Management . Here 's an article demonstrating the ManagementObjectSearcher class, where you could look for the digital cameras on USB via certain properties, such as GUID , Name , etc. If I remember correctly, you would initialise it like so:

var searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher("SELECT * FROM WIN32_USB");

And then iterate through,

foreach(var device in searcher.Get())

and check the properties:

if(device["Name"].ToString().Equals("My Digital Camera"))

Finally, when you have done whatever you wanted to do to the files, you can delete them like so:

foreach(FileInfo[] files in pictureHandles)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < files.Length; i++)
    {
        try 
        { 
            File.Delete(files[i].FullName); 
        }
        catch(Exception ex)
        {
            // Failed to delete
        }
    }
}