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I almost never take any close up pictures with my Galaxy Nexus (and when I do, it'd be more convenient to manually switch into some kind of macro mode).

How do I stop the auto-focus from trying all possible focus positions every time I take a picture?

Such behaviour makes me lose all the good moments that I want to capture in the first place (due to a focus delay of about 3 to 5 seconds), and often results with pictures being taken out-of-focus, especially at night or through a windscreen or something. Is there a way to disable such bogus autofocus?

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It appears that Open Camera (net.sourceforge.opencamera) does contain a feature where the focus could be manually set to auto, infinity, macro, manual (locked-on-touch) and continuous.

Open Camera, focus options

It does appear to mostly work on a non-rooted Nexus 5 — changing the setting to infinity does remove the extra focusing delay prior to taking each picture (although it also appears to be buggy in such a way that changing from auto to infinity may sometimes leave the focus at the macro level, without refocusing at infinity).

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I'm sure there's some way technically to simply shut off the autofocus, making the camera start up in a default focus and never moving away from that. It is however not a function that I am aware of that it exists in custom ROMS, because that's the only place you'll find modifications like this, and unless there's a big demand for it, it's unlikely someone will code it. I've got a feeling that camera focus might be really tricky to mod from the actual OS.

I think the only way you'll solve this for sure is basically learning to code and inspecting the AOSP source, or paying a developer to do it for you. I'm almost certain it's not a native function of the Android OS.

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    Isn't there some way to simply change some setting somewhere somehow? Similar to how the plist settings are done on iOS and OS X? I don't understand how this could not be a priority: does noone use Camera for taking any non-posing pictures?
    – cnst
    Commented Jan 6, 2013 at 21:56
  • As I said, I'm not aware of it being a native function of the Android OS.
    – pzkpfw
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 22:48
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Having just experienced a similar issue, I've found that the apps "Camera FV-5" and "Cinema FV-5" both have nice extra options, including ones affecting focus. Worked for me, even if I'm not sure quite which buttons I hit.

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At the moment on my Samsung Galaxy A50 phone, you can lock the focus by:

  • opening the camera app
  • then pressing on the screen with your finger, on the spot where you want to lock the focus, for 1-2 seconds, and it should lock the focus until you tap the camera screen again
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