@brdk/node-red-picamera2

A Node-RED node to take still photos on a Raspberry Pi using the picamera2 library. This node will only work on a Raspberry Pi with a camera module enabled.

Prerequisites on the Raspberry Pi

First, make sure your Raspberry Pi Camera is physically connected and detected. On Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm or later, the libcamera stack is enabled by default.

Install picamera2 if not already available:

        sudo apt-get update
        sudo apt-get install python3-picamera2

For 90°/270° rotation support, install Pillow:

        pip3 install Pillow

If you are using the default path during the file option set - the path ~/Pictures will be used.

Runtime information

This node requires Raspberry Pi OS bookworm or later with the libcamera camera stack. Tested with a docker container running Python 3, Node.js 22, and Node-RED 4.x+.

Quick start

1. Drag picamera2-takephoto into your flow.
2. Connect an inject node to trigger captures.
3. Connect a debug node to inspect output.
4. Select file mode: use Buffered Mode for in-memory processing, or use Default and Auto File Name to save to disk.
5. Deploy and trigger.

Example flow idea:

• inject -> picamera2-takephoto (Buffered Mode) -> function (base64 encode) -> storage/API node

Screenshot:

Configuration fields

File settings

• File Mode: 0 Buffered Mode, 1 Default, 2 Auto File Name
• Image Name (autoname): used in auto mode as base name (no extension)
• File Name (filename): used in default mode as base name (no extension)
• File Path (filepath): output folder, default ~/Pictures/
• File Format (fileformat): jpeg, png, bmp

Capture settings

• Image Resolution: predefined list from 320x240 up to 3280x2464
• Rotation: 0, 90, 180, 270
• Image Flip: horizontal and vertical
• Brightness: 0 to 100 (mapped internally to libcamera range)
• Contrast: -100 to 100
• Sharpness: -100 to 100
• Quality: JPEG quality 0 to 100 (ignored for non-JPEG formats)
• ISO: 0 (auto) or fixed values 100 to 800
• Exposure: auto or manual
• AWB: auto, daylight, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent, incandescent, indoor
• Wait for AGC (agcwait): delay before capture in seconds