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I'm using fswebcam to take pictures from my webcam and write them to /var/www so that anybody can view them from my website.

The problem is that my server is a Raspberry Pi with a slow SD card. It takes several seconds to write the image to the SD card. If a user requests the image while it is still being written, they'll get a half-finished version of the image:

Is it possible to make Apache wait for an image to be fully written before it serves it?

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    How often are images saved? Are you always overwriting the same image or is there a timestamp incorporated into the filename? How is the HTML page generated that displays the image?
    – MrWhite
    Oct 24, 2015 at 10:16
  • Without an example of how you are doing this it is difficult to provide an answer. The solution will almost certainly be a Bash conditional construct or a specific list of commands like this: Take photo > write photo to card > mv or cp newly written photo to Apache directory to be served from. cp next.jpg current.jpg or something basic like that?
    – Tom Brossman
    Oct 25, 2015 at 8:09

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Moving a file within the same disk is a very quick (nearly instantaneous) operation. Instead of saving them directly to www save them to a different directory on the same disk where Apache can't see them. Then when they are fully saved, move them into place in www.

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  • This is what I ended up doing, and it worked perfectly. Thanks to you and Tom Brossman for the idea.
    – Pikamander2
    Dec 23, 2015 at 15:07
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I'm not sure about apache but I think some scripting language should be able to detect if a file is being written (perhaps using file handles?)

You can then wait for it to finish and serve the file.

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