Setting Up The Project

Episode #295 | 9 minutes | published on August 4, 2017 | Uses Xcode-9.0-beta3, swift-4

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We start by setting up the project to take photos. We start by disabling rotation, which is typical of a camera app. We then add the appropriate Info.plist entry so that we can inform the user why we need camera access. We organize the view controller intro sections to keep things tidy as we add code to the project. Finally we setup the camera capture session, which is the first step to capturing video from the camera.

This episode is part of a series: Camera Capture and Detection.

1. Intro 1 min

2. Setting Up The Project 9 min

3. Camera Preview and Sample Buffer 10 min

4. Drawing on Top of the Video Preview 14 min

5. Fixing the Coordinates 7 min

6. Perspective Outlining 9 min

7. Camera Sounds and UI 12 min

8. Rendering the Final Image 15 min

9. Capturing High Resolution Photos 17 min

10. Adding a Flash Toggle Camera Control 12 min

Initial View Controller

class CaptureViewController: UIViewController {

    // MARK: - View Lifecycle

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
    }

    override func viewDidAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
        super.viewDidAppear(animated)

        if AVCaptureDevice.authorizationStatus(for: .video) == .authorized {
            setupCaptureSession()
        } else {
            // prompt the user...
        }
    }

    // MARK: - Rotation

    override var supportedInterfaceOrientations: UIInterfaceOrientationMask {
        return [.portrait]
    }

    private func setupCaptureSession() {
       // ...
    }

}

Finding the Capture Device

    // MARK: - Camera Capture

    private func findCamera() -> AVCaptureDevice? {
        let deviceTypes: [AVCaptureDevice.DeviceType] = [
            .builtInDualCamera,
            .builtInTelephotoCamera,
            .builtInWideAngleCamera
        ]

        let discovery = AVCaptureDevice.DiscoverySession(deviceTypes: deviceTypes,
                                                         mediaType: .video,
                                                         position: .back)

        return discovery.devices.first
    }

Setting up the Capture Session

First, we add a lazy property to return a new instance.

    // MARK: - Properties

    lazy var captureSession: AVCaptureSession = {
        let session = AVCaptureSession()
        session.sessionPreset = .high
        return session
    }()

Then we can add inputs to it...

    private func setupCaptureSession() {
        // if we've added inputs already, don't do it again...
        guard captureSession.inputs.isEmpty else { return }

        // make sure we have a camera to attach to
        guard let camera = findCamera() else {
            print("No camera found")
            return
        }

        do {
            // add the input
            let cameraInput = try AVCaptureDeviceInput(device: camera)
            captureSession.addInput(cameraInput)


        } catch let e {
            print("Error creating capture session: \(e)")
            return
        }
    }

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