To apply effects to the input of your webcam, click the button labelled Effects. When you go to the effects window, you will see a window similar to the image below

Figure 2 Cheese effects screenshot

You are able to select numerous effects to apply to your photo. To apply an effect, just click on the name or image above, and the button will turn to a blue shade. Selecting multiple effects will apply all the effects to your image (for example, if you apply “Hulk” and “Horizontal Flip”, the input from the webcam will be altered to have a green shade and be up side down).

Photo mode is the default mode that Cheese opens in. When not in photo mode, click the button labelled “Photo” or press Alt – P to change to photo mode. Photo mode will take a single photo every time the button labelled “Take a photo” or the Spacebar is pressed, and will save to disk.

Video mode is a mode that allows you to take short videos using the webcam. When not in video mode, click the button labelled “Video” or press Alt – V to change to video mode. Video mode will start recording a video every time the button labelled “Start Recording” or the Spacebar is pressed. The video will stop recording and save to disk when the button labelled “Stop Recording” or the Spacebar is pressed.

The video mode does look any different to the screen shot of photo mode, except that the button labelled “Take a photo” will be either “Start Recording” or “Stop Recording” (depends if you are currently recording or not), and the button labelled “Video” is greyed out, whereas the button labelled “Photo” is not.

To take a photo in Cheese, be sure to be in “Photo” mode.

To take a photo, apply the effects that you wish by clicking the button labelled “Effects”, click on the effects desired as described in a previous section and press the button labelled “Back”. You should now have the effects that you clicked on applied to the webcam input.

To take the photo, press the button labelled “Take a photo”. You will then see Cheese count down from 3. At the end of the count, your entire screen will flash white, and the photo that was just taken will appear in the photo stream at the bottom of the program window.

To take a video in Cheese, make sure that the “Video” button has been pressed

To start recording a video, press the button labelled “Start Recording” or press the Spacebar. The time of how much video has been recorded will appear in the bottom right hand corner.

To view a video or photo that has been taken, locate it in the photo stream and double click on it. Alternatively, you can right click on it and select “Open”. This will then open the file in the default application for that file type.

To save a photo to an alternate place on your hard drive where you can easily find them, find the photo or video that you wish to save in the photo stream, right click on it and select “Save As” from the pop-up menu. This will bring up a standard “Save File” dialog that will allow you to rename the photo if desired and save to any location you wish.

To delete a photo from the photo stream, locate the photo you wish to delete in the photo stream, left click on it once and press the delete button on your keyboard. Alternatively, you can right click on it and click “Delete”.

You will be prompted if you wish to delete it from the photo stream. To confirm, press the button labelled “Move to Trash”.

Photos can be directly emailed from Cheese. You will need to have the default mail client set up with an email account, otherwise you will need to set one up. To email a photo, locate the photo you wish to email in the photo stream, right click on it and select “Send by Mail”.

This will open the default mail client (for example, Evolution) and a new email message with the photo as an attachment.

To set a photo as your account photo (which can be viewed from System -> Preferences -> About Me, and which will also appear if the login window displays a list of user names with photos), locate the photo that you wish to set in Cheese, right click on it and select “Set as Account Photo”

To export a photo to F-Sport, locate the photo that you wish to export in your photo stream, right click on it and select “Export to F-Spot”. You will then be prompted from F-Spot if you wish to import the photos that are sent to it.

You may have set "ximagesink" ("X Window System (No Xv)") as video-output. This means, that your cpu is doing all the work. Change it to "xvimagesink" ("X Window System (X11/XShm/Xv)") in order to let your graphics card do the work.

To change the settings, run "gstreamer-properties", click the Video tab and change the appropriate settings.

This is a problem with the ATI graphics card, though there is a work around. Change the video-output to custom and insert the following: "ffmpegcolorspace ! video/x-raw-yuv,format=(fourcc)YV12 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink".

To change the settings, run "gstreamer-properties", click the Video tab and select custom from the drop down menu.

Using "gstreamer-properties" mentioned in the above question, try changing from xvimagesink to ximagesink or vice-versa. If this still does not work run "cheese --verbose" on the command line and copy the logging into a bug report in our bug tracker.

See if your webcam works when testing it in "gstreamer-properties". If it works there, but not in Cheese, please file a bug report in our bug tracker.

Your photos are stored in ~/.gnome2/cheese/media. You can also save them to an alternate location from within Cheese. Please see the help topic titled "Saving photos and videos to an alternate location" for information on this.

or gstreamer, and I see errors like "Not enough buffers. We got 1, we want at least 2" in the Cheese output. With driver "qc-usb".

Try running "qcset /dev/video0 compat=dblbuf" to enable double buffer compatibility mode, then restart Cheese

Cheese uses gstreamer for video grabbing. So in principle Cheese supports any camera that works with GStreamer. In principle that should be any camera which support video4linux or video4linux2.