The investigation of macro-benthic fauna in the intertidal zone is a crucial part of biodiversity monitoring in coastal wetlands. However, there are still some critical gaps, such as the great effects of human disturbance, time-consuming and labor-intensive, that exist in the widely used traditional invasive survey methods (e.g., excavation, hand catch, and pitfall trapping) at present. Thus, it is hard for us to objectively investigate the community structure and biodiversity of important functional groups with intense activity such as crabs. The camera trap is commonly used in the study of terrestrial wildlife. A camera trapping method was designed with the character of portable to meet the application conditions of the intertidal zone. We took crabs in mangrove wetlands as the survey object. Then, the application of the camera trapping method in the study of intertidal benthic crab community ecology was discussed by comparing it with the three traditional invasive survey methods. The results showed that:(1) The camera trapping method was 2.1 times higher than the excavation method, 10.3 times higher than the hand catch method, and 16.3 times higher than the pitfall trapping method in population density determination. (2) The results of the number of species of camera trapping method was higher than the three traditional invasive survey methods. And camera trapping method was suitable for the investigation of Grapsidae and Ocypodidae. (3) The camera trapping method had weak selectivity on individual size and was more comprehensive in sampling. (4) The camera trapping method is no less than invasive survey methods on community alpha diversity (Shannon-Wiener index), beta diversity (total variance of the quadrat-abundance matrix, Var(Y)), and functional diversity (Rao quadratic entropy and functional dispersion). In addition, compared with the invasive survey methods, the camera trapping method has minor damage to the structure of sediment, does not interfere with the crab community structure, and has high efficiency while taking the data richness into account. However, because the camera trapping method is based on the surface activity of crabs, it cannot be applied to winter surveys and surveys of nocturnal crabs and swimming crabs. In the future, the development of camera trapping will be combined with image processing technology based on deep learning to meet data processing needs. This study revealed the advantages and limitations of the camera trapping method in the investigation of the intertidal benthic crab community. It also provided technical support for the study of intertidal macro-benthic community ecology.