Image Capture Overview

Starting with Mac OS 10.6, you can use ImageKit and the ImageCaptureCore framework to find and control image capture devices (cameras, scanners, and multifunction devices such as camera/phones and printer/scanners).

You can open a browser that dynamically detects all cameras and scanners attached by USB or available over the network. You can limit the browser to displaying only cameras, only scanners, only local, or only network devices, or any combination of these. You can choose any available device using the browser, and can open a session with the selected device to list and fetch thumbnails, images, video, and other files from cameras, or to control the scan process of scanners.

ImageKit provides a complete UI for these tasks, allowing you to create applications that find and control cameras and scanners entirely by dragging and dropping objects using Interface Builder.

ImageCaptureCore provides the same capabilities using a programmatic interface, allowing you to write headless applications or to provide your own custom UI. ImageCaptureCore also includes some controls not available from ImageKit, such as choosing the default application to launch when a camera is connected.

You can use both ImageKit and ImageCaptureCore in the same application. For example, you could use ImageKit to provide the main interface and add additional custom controls using ImageCaptureCore.

To create an ImageKit application, link your Xcode project to the Quartz framework. For ImageCaptureCore, link to QuartzFoundation. If you are using both, add both frameworks.

ImageKit

ImageKit provides four image capture classes:

These four classes are available as drag-and-drop objects in the ImageKit library for Interface Builder, so it’s possible to create an application that browses for and controls cameras and scanners literally without writing a line of code. For an example, see Creating an Application Using ImageKit.

Adding scanning and image capture to an existing application with these classes requires only the few lines of "glue" code to integrate the window constructed in Interface Builder into your application.

ImageCaptureCore

The ImageCaptureCore framework contains classes that allow you to browse for image capture devices and control them programatically. These classes are strongly analogous to the ImageKit classes, but they provide no UI. Instead, they have methods for which you create delegates, allowing you to take whatever action you choose in response to the events these objects respond to.

For example, ImageCaptureCore contains a device browser class, ICDeviceBrowser. This performs the same functions as ImageKit’s IKDeviceBrowserView—it dynamically detects available image capture devices. But instead of displaying a list of devices, it has methods such as didAddDevice and didRemoveDevice whose delegates are called when the device browser detects a device or sees a device removed.

Your application defines these delegate methods. For example, when a device is detected, your version of didAddDevice is called. It might get the device and store it in a mutable array, then go on to display the array of devices using a table view.

Similarly, ImageCaptureCore contains a camera device class and a scanner device class, analogous to ImageKit’s camera view and scanner view.

All the ImageCaptureCore classes support Cocoa bindings, so you can, for example, use Interface Builder to assign your own custom view as the delegate for an ImageCaptureCore device browser object, obviating the need to construct the entire UI programatically.

You can mix and match ImageKit and ImageCaptureCore objects in your code. For example, you might use an ImageKit device browser to allow users to find and select a scanner, but use your own UI to control the scanner using ImageCaptureCore.

You can write an ImageCaptureCore application in as little as a few dozen lines of code. For an example, see Creating an Application Using ImageCaptureCore.