Skip to main content

Camera Devices

What are camera devices?​

Camera devices are the physical (or "virtual") devices that can be used to record videos or capture photos.

  • Physical: A physical camera device is a camera lens on your phone. Different physical camera devices have different specifications, such as different capture formats, field of views, frame rates, focal lengths, and more. Some phones have multiple physical camera devices.

    Examples: "Backside Wide-Angle Camera", "Frontside Wide-Angle Camera (FaceTime HD)", "Ultra-Wide-Angle back camera".

  • Virtual: A virtual camera device is a combination of one or more physical camera devices, and provides features such as virtual-device-switchover while zooming or combined photo delivery from all physical cameras to produce higher quality images.

    Examples: "Triple-Camera", "Dual-Wide-Angle Camera"

Get available camera devices​

To get a list of all available camera devices, use the getAvailableCameraDevices function:

const devices = await Camera.getAvailableCameraDevices()

Each camera device provides properties describing the features of this device. For example, a camera device provides the hasFlash property which is true if the device supports activating the flash when taking photos or recording videos.

The most important properties are:

  • devices: A list of physical device types this camera device consists of. For a single physical camera device, this property is always an array of one element. For virtual multi-cameras this property contains all the physical camera devices that are combined to create this virtual multi-camera device
  • position: The position of the camera device relative to the phone (front, back)
  • hasFlash: Whether this camera device supports using the flash to take photos or record videos
  • hasTorch: Whether this camera device supports enabling/disabling the torch at any time (Camera.torch prop)
  • isMultiCam: Determines whether the camera device is a virtual multi-camera device which contains multiple combined physical camera devices.
  • minZoom: The minimum available zoom factor. This value is often 1. When you pass zoom={0} to the Camera, the minZoom factor will be applied.
  • neutralZoom: The zoom factor where the camera is "neutral". For any wide-angle cameras this property might be the same as minZoom, where as for ultra-wide-angle cameras ("fish-eye") this might be a value higher than minZoom (e.g. 2). It is recommended that you always start at neutralZoom and let the user manually zoom out to minZoom on demand.
  • maxZoom: The maximum available zoom factor. When you pass zoom={1} to the Camera, the maxZoom factor will be applied.
  • formats: A list of all available formats (See Camera Formats)
  • supportsParallelVideoProcessing: Determines whether this camera devices supports using Video Recordings and Frame Processors at the same time. (See supportsParallelVideoProcessing)
  • supportsFocus: Determines whether this camera device supports focusing (See Focusing)
note

See the CameraDevice type for full API reference

For debugging purposes you can use the id or name properties to log and compare devices. You can also use the devices properties to determine the physical camera devices this camera device consists of, for example:

  • For a single Wide-Angle camera, this would be ["wide-angle-camera"]
  • For a Triple-Camera, this would be ["wide-angle-camera", "ultra-wide-angle-camera", "telephoto-camera"]

You can use the helper function parsePhysicalDeviceTypes to convert a list of physical devices to a single device descriptor type which can also describe virtual devices:

console.log(device.devices)
//  --> ["wide-angle-camera", "ultra-wide-angle-camera", "telephoto-camera"]

const deviceType = parsePhysicalDeviceTypes(device.devices)
console.log(deviceType)
//  --> "triple-camera"

Always choose a camera device that is best fitted for your use-case; so you might filter out any cameras that do not support flash, have low zoom values, are not on the back side of the phone, do not contain a format with high resolution or fps, and more.

caution

Make sure to be careful when filtering out unneeded camera devices, since not every phone supports all camera device types. Some phones don't even have front-cameras. You always want to have a camera device, even when it's not the one that has the best features.

The useCameraDevices hook​

VisionCamera provides a hook to make camera device selection a lot easier. You can specify a device type to only find devices with the given type:

function App() {
  const devices = useCameraDevices('wide-angle-camera')
  const device = devices.back

  if (device == null) return <LoadingView />
  return (
    <Camera
      style={StyleSheet.absoluteFill}
      device={device}
    />
  )
}

Or just return the "best matching camera device". This function prefers camera devices with more physical cameras, and always ranks "wide-angle" physical camera devices first.

Example: triple-camera > dual-wide-camera > dual-camera > wide-angle-camera > ultra-wide-angle-camera > telephoto-camera > ...

function App() {
  const devices = useCameraDevices()
  const device = devices.back

  if (device == null) return <LoadingView />
  return (
    <Camera
      style={StyleSheet.absoluteFill}
      device={device}
    />
  )
}

The supportsParallelVideoProcessing prop​

Camera devices provide the supportsParallelVideoProcessing property which determines whether the device supports using Video Recordings (video={true}) and Frame Processors (frameProcessor={...}) at the same time.

If this property is false, you can either enable video, or add a frameProcessor, but not both.

Examples​

  • An app that only supports taking photos (e.g. a vintage Polaroid Camera app) works on every Camera device because the supportsParallelVideoProcessing only affects video processing.
  • An app that supports taking photos and videos (e.g. a Camera app) works on every Camera device because only a single video processing feature is used (video).
  • An app that only uses Frame Processors (e.g. the "Hotdog/Not Hotdog detector" app) (no taking photos or videos) works on every Camera device because it only uses a single video processing feature (frameProcessor).
  • An app that uses Frame Processors and supports taking photos and videos (e.g. Snapchat, Instagram) only works on Camera devices where supportsParallelVideoProcessing is true. (iPhones and newer Android Phones)
note

Actually the limitation also affects the photo feature, but VisionCamera will automatically fall-back to Snapshot capture if you are trying to use multiple features (photo + video + frameProcessor) and they are not natively supported. (See "Taking Snapshots")


🚀 Next section: Camera Lifecycle​