pistill

Pistill is a term encountered in Raspberry Pi camera documentation and projects to refer to a command-line tool for capturing still photographs from a Camera Module. In official Raspberry Pi OS releases, the canonical tool for this purpose is raspistill. Pistill is commonly used as an informal shorthand or, less commonly, as a misspelling of raspistill in community tutorials and forks.

Overview and capabilities

Pistill, like raspistill in practice, is used to capture still images from Raspberry Pi camera modules (both v1 and v2). It can produce image files in JPEG format by default and allows a range of adjustments, including image size, quality, exposure settings, white balance, ISO, and various image effects. It also supports overlays, timestamps, and metadata, as well as timing and sequencing options for single-shot, time-lapse, or burst captures. The interface is typically accessed from the command line with options to specify output location, capture duration, and capture parameters.

Relation to libcamera

In more recent Raspberry Pi camera stacks based on libcamera, the recommended still-image tool is libcamera-still, which supersedes the older raspistill workflow in many setups. Because pistill is not a formal, standalone project name in current documentation, its use generally points to the same underlying functionality described by raspistill or to legacy references.

See also

raspistill, libcamera-still, libcamera, Raspberry Pi Camera Module.