Discussion

Open Camera

lightedman: It's usable but that's all I can say for it. Changing settings for simply adjusting ISO makes the processing of images take forever. I tried to use it so I could capture poorly-illuminating LEDs in a strip at work and ended up just using a DSLR in manual mode, it was much faster.

plqbfbv: Yeah, I agree. I've used it until 3 days ago, then after ~1y I got tired of taking the occasional pictures with HDR on and waiting 3-5 minutes for them to be processed and saved, while producing 3 other copies in the gallery.Quality looked amazing, but the pre-installed phone camera gets close enough and it's instant.

eth0up: I've been using open camera on android since 2019.It's far superior to anything I've seen natively installed on any device. It has a lot of options, which I suspect can be confusing to some, but they're worth familiarizing with.My favorite feature is the macro, which when coupled with the right UI settings produces photos that when I have printed, result in the person saying "wow! You took that with a phone!?". And I say "yeah. Open Camera. It's great, try it sometime".Highly recommend.

butILoveLife: What phone do you have?I havent tried Open Camera in a while, but my conclusion is that the phone's camera app is best.

eth0up: Unable to afford a Google-free phone, I strictly use Moto, which with a bit of adb work and a lot of disabling shitware, gets close to actual Android. They also have excellent glass, aside from doing all I require of them.I see criticism of Open Cam already, but I recommend trying it, with patience, and seeing what it can do. All my art images, all my videos, are all taken with open camera.Edit: for the macro setting, it allows fine tuning, but the manual focus and manual zoom functions are superb for my purposes.Edit2: Maybe irrelevant, but I always disable the stock camera and anything camera related. Not sure if that helps, but I know I don't want any fucking thing to do with shitware, so go as nuclear as possible.

StingyJelly: That's a weird bug. For me it always works almost instantly with the exception of long exposures where it sometimes takes 2x the exposure time.Did you switch to Camera2 API in settings>Camera Api ?

fuddle: The website is almost unreadable with so many ads.Also I think this is overkill? "The following files are used in Open Camera"

cc-d: find an version of open camera with the hash you like. we put rare pepes in apks both on the play store and avaliable to the open internet all the time

_verandaguy: What's a rare pepe and how does it support the project?

esafak: Is it really as good as Google Camera at computational photography; noise reduction, night mode, deblurring, stacking, etc.? That would be very impressive.

Cider9986: GrapheneOS secure camera is great. https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Camera

HelloUsername: Would this be the iOS 'alternative'? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47010018

Arainach: Dismissing the stock apps as "shitware" without bothering to try them or offer specific examples of areas where Opencam is better does not inspire confidence in your opinions.Full manual controls does not mean "better". I've been a photographer for more than 20 years using everything from fully-manual (no battery) film setups through modern mirrorless bodies. I know the tradeoffs between shutter speed, ISO, and aperture, I know how to manual focus.....and most of the time I don't want any of those, especially on a phone, where I want a clear photo of a stationary object and the phone's automatic settings get it right the first time.If something allows full manual controls but takes two seconds longer to be ready to shoot it is significantly worse as a camera for most of my use cases.

eth0up: I'm not asking for confidence. Folks can use their own critical thinking and judgement. I expressed sincerity. Some concur, some don't. I'm not trying and will not try to please everyone.The current state of software is to some, myself, deeply offensive and many have passionate opposition to it. If you are into stockware, you won't ever find me in your way. But you'll not bully me into not expressing my opinion either. Shitware defines it perfectly to the very type of person bothering to use Fdroid and freedom respecting devices.

Arainach: What dark patterns is the Pixel Camera app using, or what bad things is it doing with my data? In what way is my camera app infringing on my freedom? "It was written by company X I don't like" is not an answer - why should I replace my camera app specifically?

tekla: No. It actually kinda sucks.Its the same way that the Pinephone is "usable" but really, it sucks.

eth0up: Depends on specific purpose and values. And it's a simple installation away from empirical validation.Edit: one feature I'm fond of, when posting images on the Internet, is disabling exif data. I don't always want to put my coordinates on the Internet.

BeetleB: Disclaimer: I last used it years ago.My experience was that while it was great with all the features, the photo quality simply was worse than the stock manufacturer app in newer phones. Only in my old Samsung Galaxy S5 was the quality on par.Yes, by all means, everyone should try and compare.

ValentineC: I downloaded that on my spare Android phone (I'm primarily an iOS 17 user), but never ended up using it because it just wasn't aesthetically pleasant. I also don't really take photos using my Android phone, I guess.Randomly, I wish more UI/UX designers contribute to open source.

petterroea: This. I've had so many projects where I wish someone who really cared about UX could just tell me "this sucks, if you want I can help"

flykespice: Many programmers think they can cheat their way into designing a good UI, they just think it's just enough for you to learn and use a GUI framework, and place the widgets in a "good enough" way.Just look at the monstruosity that is the GUI version of wget, it's the epitome of programmers with no UX background trying to make a GUI application.

drnick1: You really need to start using an ad blocker. I don't see any ads at all, anywhere on the Internet. It boggles my mind that someone who reads HN does not use an ad blocker in 2026.

lukan: Oh there are still ads as some are baked into the content, but I can live with those. How people can live with the normal amount of ads - no idea.

afarah1: I've used it for several years now, it's a great app. Not perfect, there is noticeable lag to capture high resolution images, and lacks shutter speed control. Still, beats other FOSS alternatives in my experience.

Markoff: open camera pretty much always delivers worse results than gcam, have you tried it?https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/p/gcam-asus-zenfo...

lukan: I suppose if someone thought this, they would not have dared saying it?Many do make horrible UI, but would react poorly to criticism, hard to know before ..

Refreeze5224: He's a troll.

XorNot: Funnily enough I use this just to have a camera which saves to a different directory for keeping RealityScan images apart from my general photos.

seanw444: That really should be a standard setting for camera apps.

catgirlinspace: there’s a gui for wget??

jeffreygoesto: Handbrake ;)

joymonger: I wonder if we can get some UX folks to volunteer a day to review and write up improvement suggestions for various popular open source projects. I personally know bad UX when I see it, but I'm no expert on making good UX ;-)

RussianCow: I use this on my Zenfone 8. It's...okay. The UI is pretty sub-par, but the main reason I use it is because the camera, by default, has this annoying, overly aggressive denoising filter built into it that makes everything look slightly cartoony, and there's no way to disable it with any other camera app I've tried.

Markoff: open camera pretty much always delivers worse results than gcam, have you tried it?https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/p/gcam-asus-zenfo...

RussianCow: I haven't. I'll give it a try! Thanks!

joymonger: wget is a download CLI tool. Handbrake is a video transcoder. I feel like I'm missing something, or just missed the joke lol.

yonatan8070: I Googled screenshots of "wget gui" and "handbrake software", both are GUI programs with a whole lot of dropdowns, checkboxes, etc.Maybe that's the meaning of the parent comment?

Markoff: tried to visit it without ublock, I still don't see any ads at all and see no reason why there would be any, can you tell me were are the ads?

andai: Here is a screenshot:https://files.catbox.moe/ukxte8.pngI do have to wonder if this is a net negative. At least for me, it significantly reduces trust and respect for the website and developer, while I can't imagine the traffic produces any meaningful revenue?

pwg: With ublock origin, none of that appears on the site.

unglaublich: No wonder regular people hate technology.

ValentineC: The pre-iOS 26 native camera app is good enough for me, and I really like Live Photos, which most alternatives don't handle.I had a one-time purchase to Halide, but it somehow stopped working in early 2025 because Halide support claimed that the app's feature unlock (used to be one-time upfront purchase, now IAP) only works if I'm logged into the App Store account I purchased it from.

Sateallia: With Open Camera, my device (and seemingly many others) have phantom cameras with IDs that crash Android's camera server if accessed. When that happens I have to restart my phone. Open Camera does not have a way to blacklist those. There are several issues open about this on the issue tracker but they have been open since 2020.The other two prominent open source camera apps are Fossify Camera and PhotonCamera. Fossify Camera does not support multiple lenses yet. PhotonCamera is nice because it does image processing and handles my camera lenses correctly but its UX is janky (on my device, with default settings, taking a photo takes 7-8 seconds and quitting the app before the process is complete loses the image), it's not on F-Droid and it doesn't automatically switch between lenses with zoom changes. There's also FreeDcam but I'm not a professional photographer and I'm certainly not going to buy a color calibration reference card that costs more than a hundred dollars.It sucks that on my phone with /e/OS, instead of using a FOSS camera app, I resort to using Pixel's camera app with internet permission disabled to be able to take advantage of my hardware.

VladVladikoff: What's fascinating to me is it looks totally different for me when I turned off my adblocker. We are i guess targeted differently by these ad companies. https://files.catbox.moe/9einuv.png

FireInsight: What I love in Open Camera is that I am able to turn off all extra post-processing (noise, yes please) and use my phone camera with full manual settings like it was a DSLR (with a really bad sensor). Only problems are clunky UI and general slowness of taking pictures, but you get used to it.It's really unbeatable from a photographer / artist perspective, especially because I care a lot about imperfect gritty noisy looks and full control.

eloop: Yep, web browsers.

wonger_: There are some initiatives for designers to contribute to OSS, like this one: https://opensourcedesign.netDunno how popular/successful/active it is, tho.

yonatan8070: If only the average person wasn't afraid of a directory tree...

XorNot: It wouldn't quite solve it: the issue is it's very helpful to hit a button on my phones home screen to get "different directory" immediately via a different shortcut.Like there's a fair bit of ergonomics here which I'm brute forcing by just having two camera apps.

flykespice: yes https://www.jensroesner.com/wgetgui/wgetgui.png

wyan: It says it's OSS, but I can't find a link to the source code in the website, am I just being dense?

like_any_other: You're wishing for a very double-edged sword. UI designers do as much harm as good. Disappearing scroll bars, rounded window corners for square content, hiding primary functionality inside a hamburger menu when there's plenty of room for labeled buttons, removing maximize/minimize buttons in favor of non-discoverable keyboard shortcuts.. I'm sure I'm forgetting lots, and that's just on GNOME.As a rule, if you, a non-UI designer, are bothered by it, then it doesn't take a UI designer to fix it.

jimnotgym: More than anything, I wish UI designers would work really hard on V1.0 and then leave it alone. There is nothing worse than having things move around on stuff you have been using for years, especially if you use it professionally. Add the new options at the end of the ribbon MS. While you are at it, don't make the menu items suddenly bigger so they look good on my big monitor, but then hide some of them when I use my laptop (that they fitted ok on last week). Don't move the account menu from the top to the bottom Reddit. I think that is one reason I keep coming back to hn. The UI has been the same the whole time I have been here

LoganDark: I used to use Open Camera, but I started having an issue where it would not take photos, and would just wait indefinitely for the camera to focus. It would completely lock up until I moved the phone somewhere else, pointed it at something, and waited and waited and waited for the camera to be happy about the focus, and only then would it take a photo. But this made it useless to get photos in most of the situations where I wanted photos. I couldn't find any documentation about this or settings about this; I must have gone through the entire settings tree at least five times trying to figure out why it was waiting for the camera to focus before taking a photo, but I could never figure out why, or whether it's possible to disable that.

tananaev: No link to source and just says "The source code is available from Open Camera's SourceForge page." Why not link it?

tl2do: I couldn’t find it at first, but it is there on SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/code/ci/master/tree/app...

cozzyd: your ad is worse because it looks like it could be part of the website...

cozzyd: every once in a while I click on the google feed on my phone, which instead of opening in firefox like it should opens in some chrome webview with no ublock. It is truly atrocious (and... if you don't have unlimited data, expensive too).