PinePhone Pro: Camera

The PinePhone Pro has two cameras, Sony IMX258 with 13MP as rear camera and OmniVision OV8858 with 8MP as front-facing camera.

Example picture taken on the PinePhone’s (not Pro) rear camera by Martijn Braam using his app Megapixels.

Example picture taken on the PinePhone’s (not Pro) rear camera by Martijn Braam using his app Megapixels.

As mentioned in Software State, the cameras are work-in-progress, including a required DTS fix, userspace still needs to do some catching up and there is a green image tint. This article explains how to fix camera sofware on your PinePhone Pro. The work is on progress and will be available soon for different distributions. Make sure your PinePhone Pro is connected to the web to download needed software.

Arch Linux ARM + Phosh Installation

Open terminal and update your system:

$ sudo pacman -Syyuu

Remove original Megapixels app:

$ sudo pacman -Rns megapixels

Install camera dependencies:

$ sudo pacman -Syu gst-plugin-libcamera libcamera-tools pipewire-libcamera

Install flatpak software manager:

$ sudo pacman -S flatpak

Install Megapixels2 app:

$ flatpak install https://flatpak.brixit.nl/megapixels2.flatpakref --user

You will be prompted to some options

  • Should the remote be kept for future installations? [Y/n]: n
  • Configure this as new remote ‘flathub’ [Y/n]: y
  • Required runtime for me.gapixels.Megapixels/aarch64/master (runtime/org.gnome.Platform/aarch64/47) found in remote flathub. Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: y

To launch camera app you can both click on Megapixels icon on your desktop or enter into terminal following command

$ flatpak run me.gapixels.Megapixels

In case you need to reinstall Megapixels2

$ flatpak list
$ flatpak uninstall --delete-data me.gapixels.Megapixels
$ flatpak uninstall --unused
$ flatpak repair

Green Tint Issue

To fix the green tint issue during post processing of your pictures, add “-a” and “-f” to dcraw line (about #82) into postprocess.sh file

First look for postprocess.sh file:

$ cd ../..
$ sudo find / -type f -name postprocess.sh

Goto the postprocess.sh directory you found using the above command. Here the example /var/lib/flatpak/app/me.gapixels.Megapixels/aarch64/master/[…]/files/share/megapixels/postprocess.sh is used:

$ cd /var/lib/flatpak/app/me.gapixels.Megapixels/aarch64/master/[...]/files/share/megapixels

Backup original file and add “-a” and “-f” to dcraw line, using replace command:

$ sudo cp postprocess.sh postprocess.sh.bk
$ sudo sed -i 's/$DCRAW +M -H 4 -o 1 -q 3 -T "$@" "$MAIN_PICTURE.dng"/$DCRAW +M -H 4 -o 1 -q 3 -T -a -f "$@" "$MAIN_PICTURE.dng"/' postprocess.sh

Further details regarding the camera and the Megapixels camera app can be found on Martijn’s blog.