Auto Webcam Photo to FileMaker (Windows)

A follow up by Douglas Alder to an earlier post about capturing webcam photos to FileMaker on a Mac, this post goes through the much more complicated process of doing so from Windows:

The Challenge: Capturing images from a web cam into FileMaker on Windows. I was able to achieve this previously on a Mac using AppleScript, but there is no similar easy inter-application scripting language on Windows. FileMaker Go on mobile has the ability to grab photos right from the camera on an iPhone or iPad. Most PCs these days have a webcam plugged in and many laptops have built-in cameras, but so far FileMaker Inc., does not directly support the capability of taking photos in its desktop applications. Hopefully this feature will be added going forward. In the meantime, this hack provides a workaround.

My reason for attempting this project was to automate the process of taking customer photos at a gym for my PassTracker software. Usually I recommend that PassTracker owners run their systems on a Macintosh, but sometimes they already have Windows computers setup and don’t want to switch over.

Alder uses 360Works ScriptMaster to capture portions of a Web Viewer window containing the photo streaming from the web cam. Nice out of the box thinking!

Still, the whole workaround is a bit difficult to set up, and requires pretty good programming skills. However, the challenge was set and met, and photos are being taken and stored directly within FileMaker.

Source: Auto Webcam Photo to FileMaker (Windows) | HomeBase Software

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