Connect to digital camera from cellphone?

Question

A customer (photographer) asked me, if it was possible to write some kind of software for cellphones, so he could physically connect it to his professional digital camera (Canon or Nikon) and transfer the pictures (or a subset) to the cellphone.

I am trying not to put constraints on cellphone platform (Symbian, Windows Mobile etc) from the beginning, so I am leaving that sort of constraints out on purpose.

Can anybody give me some hints?

Answer 1

You need a connection between the camera and the cellphone:

• Some windows mobile devices got a USB-Host-Function, so you can connect either a cardreader or the camera itself via a usb-cable and read the files from the device. I never heard of a symbian-device which supports usb-host, but there might be some.

• If the camera supports either bluetooth or ir, you could use these protocols to transfer the files as most mobile-phonse support this.

If you got a connection (and the protocol-support by your platform) it is easy to write a application to transfer the file from the device to you cellphone. You can write this application in any supported language (java for j2me, python (symbian), .net (windows mobile)

Answer 2

My digital camera saves photos to a memory card. I can simply take the memory card out of the camera and insert it into my Windows Mobile phone and view the photos on the phone.