Does your webcam have twain drivers available?  Most often do.

your options then are to use a twain interface, and there are various options on the market for that.  most are .net, some are dlls.

or you can use twain direct which is free but very new.  There is free software available to allow any connected device that uses twain to support the new twain direct REST api.  (in the future, webcams may come with twain direct embedded for driverless suport).  anyway, with that you can use the twain direct rest api to control the webcam and retrieve pictures. The downside is that all images are returned as PDF, so if you want non-pdf you would need something to extract out the jpeg pdf image.

or use something like wia and write c# code that you can call from PB 2021+

Take a picture automatically using a webcam in C# using WIA - Stack Overflow

A big disadvantage of course, because currently I capture the image in bmp format and compress it by converting it to jpg format

I insert that image into a data window later, which means that with the PDF I will hardly be able to do it.

But, the WS will surely evolve and over time I imagine they will return in the format requested.

Thanks for the information, with that basis, you can start investigating

Take a look at this tool: https://batchloaf.wordpress.com/commandcam/

You can run commandcam via the Run()-statement.

If you want to convert, edit or crop the picture you can use ImageMagick https://imagemagick.org/index.php

HTH 

Roy

I have been looking for an inexpensive (~$200 or less) webcam with a TWAIN driver for a few days.  I have seen a couple that are described as "TWAIN compatible", but do not explicitly say they come with a TWAIN driver.  The TWAIN compatible webcams are intended to be used with stand-alone photo ID systems, so I would guess the photo ID systems take care of the TWAIN driver issue.  If you have an example of a webcam that includes a TWAIN driver, that would be most appreciated. 

We have been able to implement a simple htm page using the webbrowser object and it has been working pretty good.    You can reference the simple htm page here:
https://ap-mobile.com/cdiBtmApps/webcam.htm

we register the ue_capture_trigger event and when the user clicks the take picture button, we are able to access the webcam_image.png in the downloads folder and load into a Picture Object.

webbrowser.navigationCompleted Event:

Integer li_result

li_result = wb_1.RegisterEvent("ue_capture_trigger")

If li_result = 1 Then
Else
     messagebox("Error", "Failed to register the event.")
End If

We were previously using the implementation from http://anvil-of-time.com/wordpress/powerbuilder/powerbuilder-capture-images-from-webcam/ and this seems to work much better.

Thanks
Jim