How to access a mobile's camera from a web app?

Question

In iPhone iOS6 and from Android ICS onwards, HTML5 has the following tag which allows you to take pictures from your device:

 <input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="camera">

Capture can take values like camera, camcorder and audio.

I think this tag will definitely not work in iOS5, not sure about it.

Just to update this, the standard now is:

<input type="file" name="image" accept="image/*" capture="environment">

to access the environment-facing (rear) camera, and

<input type="file" name="image" accept="image/*" capture="user">

for user-facing (front) camera. To access video, substitute "video" for "image" in name.

Tested on iPhone 5c, running iOS 10.3.3, firmware 760, works fine.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html-media-capture/

Nowadays at least with android it's relatively easy. Just use normal file input tag and when user clicks it the phone will ask if user wants to use camera (or file managers etc..) to upload a file. Just take a photo with the camera and it will automatically be added and uploaded.

No idea about iphone. Maybe someone can enlighten on that. EDIT: Iphone works similarly.

Sample of the input tag:

<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="camera">

Safari & Chrome on iOS 6+ and Android 2.2+ support HTML Media Capture which allows you to take pictures with your device's camera or select an existing one:

<input type="file" accept="image/*">

Here's how it works on iOS 10:

Android 3.0+ and Safari on iOS10.3+ also support the capture attribute which is used to jump straight to the camera.

<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture>

capture="camera" (String) and accept="image/*;capture=camera" (Parameter) were part of old specs and were replaced by capture (Boolean) the W3C Candidate Recommendation.

Support documentation: this 2013 O'Reilly book and my testing

well, there's a new HTML5 features for accessing the native device camera - "getUserMedia API"

NOTE: HTML5 can handle photo capture from a web page on Android devices (at least on the latest versions, run by the Honeycomb OS; but it can’t handle it on iPhones but iOS 6 ).

You can use WEBRTC but unfortunately it is not supported by all web browsers. BELOW IS THE LINK TO SHOW WHICH BROWSERS supports it http://caniuse.com/stream

And this link gives you an idea of how you can access it(sample code). http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/getusermedia/intro/