I'm looking to determine when a camera is plugged in via USB, and retrieve all pictures taken before a certain time.
I was wondering if anyone has done something similar?
If so, specifically how are you connecting to the camera and is it listed as a removable storage device or portable device?
I guess the biggest problem would be to detect the USB camera. What OS are you using? Unix has a couple of usb utilities you can use, e.g. lsusb. Searching for "lsusb windows" also gave me some hits.
After you've detected the camera you need to get to the files. I know cameras can connect in different modes, the easiest is probably if you can set it to a usb storage device. It implies you will be able to get to the files via a normal directory, and you will be able to check timestamps.