Automatically taking photos -- something similar to UWP's MediaCapture functionality

Question

A wrote a robotics app using UWP a few years ago, which automatically takes photos. I want to convert it to an Android (and possibly iOS) app with Xamarin, but I noticed that Xamarin's MediaPicker is a far cry from UWP's MediaCapture object. With MediaCapture I could have my app take several pictures completely on its own, without the user having to click on any buttons, with this code:

MediaCapture mediaCapture = new MediaCapture();
await mediaCapture.InitializeAsync(mediaSettings);
Low​Lag​Photo​Capture photoCapture = await mediaCapture.PrepareLowLagPhotoCaptureAsync(imageProperties);
CapturedPhoto photo = await photoCapture.CaptureAsync();
CapturedFrame frame = photo.Frame;
SoftwareBitmap SWBitmap = frame.SoftwareBitmap;

Is there a way to do the same in Xamarin?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Xamarin provides access to the full platform API for whichever platform you run on. You can use Android's Camera2 API to automatically take photos from a Xamarin app on Android just as you can use UWP's MediaCapture to do so from a Xamarin app on Windows.

API doc: Android.Hardware.Camera2
Sample: Xamarin.Android - Camera2 Basic Sample. This isn't a Forms sample and is probably a bit out of date, but it should give some basic guidance on how the Camera2 API works.