I am looking at a project that will require rather fast transfer of the shots I get.
I will be outside in the nature at different locations and my Android phone is my only connection to the storage target over 4G/5G/LTE.
From what I can tell there are a number of options:
- Shooting with a FTP tether over the phone WiFi to upload to the destination
- Shooting with a USB tether to..? My phone? A computer?
- Using wireless tether addons for greater transfer speeds, but also that will be to a computer I guess..?
Have anyone of you done this before with good transfer speeds?
I've seen videos where people mention RAW transfer times of 10-20 seconds. That will create a huge queue of photos for me to upload.
Is wired USB tether to a computer with a good internet connection the only way to achieve this?
I am OK with shooting compressed RAW to keep file sizes down, but the transfer speeds still have to be fast for this to be reliable.
All in all I just want it to be fast and reliable with as little hardware as possible.
I understand this post is more or less just a brain dump. I appreciate any pointers or suggestions.
I have never really shot tethered before, so this is jumping into the deep end of the pool directly.
Thanks.
Edit:
I am looking at getting an Sony a7iii for this, but want the solution to work for as many different camera models as possible.
It would be nice to understand what you're trying to accomplish a bit better. Are you trying to have a backup, enable yourself to do things like culling between shots, will someone be editing as you're shooting, will that someone be physically near to you or far away, etc? Also, how many photos are we talking and over what kind of time period? Will you have downtime between shots?
Ultimately, your options are going to boil down to:
Teathering
You should be able to shoot via USB teather with a computer running Lightroom, Capture One Pro, and the like pretty easily. I suspect there are commerical offerings to do this with the camera not directly connected to the computer, but I don't know what they are.
FTP
FTP is another option, but the specifics are going to depend a lot on the camera you use. For example, can you leave the FTP link open while shooting, what wifi speeds can be sustained, whether or not the camera has an Ethernet port, etc. Transferring photos won't be automatic. You'll need a piece of software polling the camera for new files and then retrieving them. You'll also likely have to tell the camera to go to sleep less often since sleeping will likely break the FTP link.
Tried and true
There's also always SD card swappy and/or USB file transfer.
Final thought: bring extra batteries and/or a camera that supports USB-PD and a battery bank.