Browse files on camera using PowerShell

Question

If I connect my digital camera via USB, Windows Explorer lists it under Computer as a device. I can browse it using Explorer, see folders, file properties etc, and copy/delete files.

This is all without setting the camera to be a storage device (in which case I believe the camera will show up as a flash drive, with an assigned drive letter, making this easy).

Is there a way for me to access and browse the files and folders on the camera using Windows PowerShell? As far as I can tell, no drive letter is (automatically) assigned to the device.

I'm not looking for workarounds - I can copy the files with explorer, not problem. I'm asking because I want to play around with PowerShell :-)

Thanks

UPDATE:

I've managed to get a Win32PnPEntity object of the camera using the following:

Get-WmiObject Win32_USBControllerDevice | ForEach-Object { $_; [Wmi]$_.Dependent }

Followed by Get-WmiObject win32_pnpentity -filter "name='Canon PowerShot A480'" using the name I got from the previous command (PNPDeviceID would probably be a better choice but the name was easier to type :P )

However, I don't know if I can do anything useful with that Win32PnPEntity object.

Answer 1

You can combine information from the two following articles: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/get-usb-using-wmi-association-classes-in-powershell/

This will allow you to retrieve the device ID associated with your specific USB device (from the Name property, for example).

Then use WMI for accessing the files: How can I create a PowerShell script to copy a file to a USB flash drive?