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Fast Wireless Tethering (feddit.nu)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/photography
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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.

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[–] Jozav 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I don't know about Sony, I'm a Fujifilm user. Some Fujifilm camera's can connect wireless to computers ~~with an app called pc-autosave~~. This will store the photos in a directory, then it is up to your solution to move them via FTP to wherever you want (most operating systems can use rsync that can sync to a server of your choice). There's a youtube movie about other wireless tethering options with Fujifilm here: https://youtu.be/4EGD2eJ8yv8?si=CoH3hdkMlwwKIWMF

Edit: PC-Autosave will not tether with my fujifilm camera, the photographer needs to choose a menu in the camera to upload photos to the pc.

[–] IMALlama 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What issue are you solving with the fast transfer requirement? Back up? Need to get smaller number of 'best' shots to someone for review? Eager not to run out of space?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I want close to real time display of the photos i shoot through a service I am planning to build. Once the file is on the FTP, the rest will be managed within seconds. The camera -> FTP transfer will be the big bottleneck here.

5 minutes delay of the upload is not a problem, but if I shoot bursts of shots faster than the average upload time over an hour or two, then I will end up with a 40 minute delay from shot to display on the service, which is not acceptable in my use case.

So one file taking 20 seconds to upload is not an issue if it is just one shot. But a burst of 8 shots taking 2 minutes will inevitably cause a queue wich will degrade the perceived quality of the service.

For this reason I believe a USB-C tether to a device with a high speed 4G/5G/LTE connection responsible for uploading the files is the best option.

The question is just, what does this box contain? How do I build that box to ensure the cellular connection, which I can not improve, is the transfer bottleneck?

[–] KingRandomGuy 3 points 3 days ago

I'd also recommend seeing how the USB protocol for your camera works. On mine (Sony A7R III) there are some relatively impactful limitations. One is that you seemingly can't shoot a burst directly over USB, but you can work around this with a shutter release cable. The other is that you can't change shutter speeds and ISOs super quickly, you can only increment/decrement them. The latter issue is fixed on newer models though.

[–] IMALlama 2 points 2 days ago

I did a tiny amount of poking around. It looks like Sony bodies connect to a FTP server and can be configured to push to it as you take photos. You can also configure if you send raw/jpeg/both. Sending non-full sized jpegs will help speed things up, especially if the photos are for mass consumption on the web.

There also appears to be a service to handle the ftp server and hosting side of things. They have a decent amount of how-to documentation: https://picportal.co/

If you're worried about raw speed, a camera with an Ethernet jack might help. I know that the A9 mk1/2 have one and there are likely others.

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Oh I see- sounds very interesting!

I guess your chief issue is having a device sync the photo folder on your camera with an FTP server? To be honest any file sync software would handle that. Here's a free open source one: https://itsfoss.com/freefilesync/. But there are many others. I guess you'd want a lightweight laptop with long battery life, the camera connected with it's folder as the source and the software configured with credentials for the FTP destination folder. You could perhaps look into 4/5G boosting antenna that could connect to laptop via USB. You'd have to keep camera physically connected to get best transfer speed (rather than rely on Bluetooth or anything like that). But sounds like that's what you're already figuring.

There may well be specialist photography gear that does this for $$$ if you want to spend them, but purely from a technical point of view this is quite easily and cheaply done.

[–] KingRandomGuy 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I haven't done this exact type of thing but my understanding is that the radios and wireless chipsets of most cameras are pretty poor in comparison to what you can get with a phone or computer. USB tethering is probably the way to go to reduce bottlenecks. You could potentially tether to a phone (though idk what the software situation looks like) or possibly an ARM SBC, as some have LTE and 5g compatibility.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The best would be if I could tether USB-C to USB-C to my phone and upload from there.

I am just not sure if there is any software lile that available.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago

If you have Android phone then you can run Linux distro with chroot or Termux. ChatGPT is pretty good at writing bash scripts.