ESP32-CAM MicroSD Card - Saving images with the ESP32-Cam

Learn to use the MicroSD card on the ESP32-CAM to store photos. We’ll also build a motion-sensitive and time-lapse camera.

The ESP32-CAM is an amazing little module, especially when you consider how inexpensive it is. With all the power of the 32-bit ESP32 combined with a 2MP camera, this board has a lot of practical applications.

It also has a MicroSD card slot, and today we will learn how to use this to store images on a MicroSD card.

We’ll examine how the ESP32 works with both the camera and the MicroSD card, and then we’ll build a simple camera. After that, we’ll turn our camera into a motion-sensitive camera, and then we’ll write some code to build a time-lapse camera.

Here is the Table of Contents for today's video:

00:00 - Introduction
01:26 - ESP32-CAM MicroSD Card
07:22 - Using the Camera and MicroSD Card
12:09 - Simple Camera
22:16 - Motion-Sensitive Camera
27:29 - Time-Lapse Camera
33:07 - Conclusion

I hope you enjoy the video!

Bill

[Dronebotworkshop]

Hi everyone - It's come to my attention that there has been someone masquerading as myself, responding to some comments here with a link to a Telegram chat to win a prize from me. THIS IS A SCAM, I am not holding a contest, nor do I have a Telegram account. PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THESE MESSAGES!!


Thanks!

Bill (The real one!)

[Lorenzo]

the quality of your videos and the explanations are far above everything i have seen.

[praveenkumar-vxkw]

for streaming, built-in webserver example is good. I have put the streaming for 4 days it is working fine. Also I suggest to do live streaming instead of storing it on SD while youtube gives a free storage for 12 hrs stream which save GBs. but you need to connect your ESP32-CAM with VLC player for this.

[DenisLEFUR]

After loosing time with partial or wrong informations, I found your site. Thanks a lot for your pedagogy !

[flyingcakes]

Your videos make it so simple and fun to follow!

[JosSSMr]

hi ;
just start my project with esp32 cam!!!
with this video nothing can be wrong

thx a lot for shared knowledge,
regards

[lundebc]

You have so many great videos! Just wanted to say thanks for publishing constantly, and for such great content!

[pileofstuff]

Thanks for this, Bill.

I've got a couple of ESP32 cam boards that I have been procrastinating tinkering with. It's good to have these tutorials available.

[acestudioscouk-Ace-GACE]

Thanks for another informative video, as a photographer by trade and a dilettante in electronics and radio, I shall have to try this one.

[tubeDude]

SDFormat works well also. SmartDisk32 search turned up, Partition Assistant Std.

[collinbetten]

I highly recommend getting the 2 dollar programmer board for the esp32cam. Programming it with FTDI can be a pain in the @$$

[tubeDude]

On the Time-Lapse, a count-down counter would be nice to have so you know when it will take the next shot.

[afyu]

Thank you for this informative video. Your clear and concise explanations of the code and the demonstration of the process were very helpful. I appreciated how you walked through the steps of setting up the hardware and software components needed to save images to the MicroSD card. Your troubleshooting tips were also very useful for those who may run into issues while working with the ESP32-CAM and the MicroSD card. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise on this topic!

[digihz_data]

Nice tutorial, but....
Bill.. You use an unsigned int as a counter (65535), but only 1 byte(255) for the eeprom. So the max count can never be more than 255 (after 255 it will go back to 0 *overflow*).
Just wanted to inform you. :)
PS:Don't forget about the initialization time for a pir sensor to(between 1 and 2 minutes)!

[ciprianpopa]

Interesting find. I can see that there are a lot of sellers offering this product on-line. What one can immediatly realize is that this one works with the OV2640 Camera. Since I am very sure many of us have a lot of cameras in their old phones that are orders of magnitudes better than the OV2640 Camera, I am curious to know whether there are dedicated boards for running better cameras, from Samsung for instance.

[usefulelectronics]

Nice tutorial!!.
I wonder if it is possible to use a better camera module one with better quality

[tonykempson]

Excellent! Thank you! I appreciate the detailed way that you explained the code.

[zyghom]

it took me some time to realize how come, some boards require to press the boot and reset buttons to program the ESP and some other boards don't need that and Arduino puts the ESP32 into the boot mode automatically. The solution is simple: DTR and RST pins from FTDI connected to GPIO-0 and ENABLE pins accordingly - then magic happens ;-)

[celestesneed]

I love your channel! Totally addicted

[imrekiss]

Is there any kind of microcontroller+CAM modul which can take picture with good enough quality? Becasuse this ESP32-CAM+OV2640 has rather very bad picture quality.