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WiFi tethered shooting to Lightroom

I’ve been getting a lot of feedback and some questions about shooting tethered in to Lightroom 5.3 with the EOS 6D. What’s more my post from the beginning of 2013 about tethered shooting with the EOS 6D to Lightroom was the most read post here in the last twelve months.

Lightroom 5.3 doesn’t support WiFi connected EOS cameras

Lightroom tethered wifi eos

Lightroom 5.3 can’t find a WiFi connected EOS 70D or EOS 6D

Despite the fact that an EOS 70D was happily connected to my computer and able to transfer images using EOS Utility I could not get Lightroom 5.3 to work with the Lightroom Tethered Capture feature. It just shows no camera detected., but I have a solution that works.

EOS 6D EOS 70D lightroom wifi tethering

How to tether an EOS 6D or EOS 70D to Lightroom 5.3 using a WiFi connection

In essence the solution is to use EOS Utility to handle the communication with the camera and put the images on to your computer hard disk; then use the Auto Import function in Lightroom to import the images and display them.

Configuring your system for WiFi tethered shooting…

1

 

Setup the camera and EOS Utility to talk to each other.

You will need to start the process on the camera in the WiFi menu, and then when prompted start the pairing software on the computer. Once this initial connection is configured it can be saved for instant recall later. If you change any part of the “connection” then you will need to redo this part again. For example in the studio I use a WiFi network with the name p4pictures with a wireless router and my MacBook Pro, this is one configuration stored on the camera. When i’m on site then I mostly connect direct to the MacBook over WiFi using ad-hoc mode so this requires a second stored setup on the camera. It’s simple to switch from one setup to the other on the camera.

2

Set EOS Utility to start when the camera connects on WiFi.

By default EOS Utility is set to present a range of choices of action to the user when a camera is connected. For this case we want EOS Utility to got directly to the Camera settings/Remote Shooting mode. This is found in the EOS Utility preferences.

To avoid confusion I set EOS Utility to put the files in a specific folder on my computer, and to rename them. These settings are also found in the EOS Utility preferences, and while you are there make sure EOS Utility is not set to ‘wake-up’ Digital Photo Professional or any other software – even Lightroom.

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I make sure to uncheck the Automatically display Quick Preview window, since EOS Utility has it’s own preview window and the goal here is to use Lightroom instead.

UPDATE: If you use EOS Utility 2.14 or 3.0 you want to have a look here too

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I use the custom folder name EOS Utility WiFi to put the images in as they are captured by the camera, details in the screenshot below.EU-WiFi-setup3

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I usually get EOS Utility to prepend the year and month to the filename with a customised file naming template as shown below.EU-WiFi-setup5

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If you like, you can shoot RAW and a smaller JPEG on the camera and only send the JPEG to the computer. This makes for faster transfers plus you will have the RAW later if needed. I would definitely recommend saving the images on the camera memory card, otherwise a dropped WiFi connection can lose your image completely.

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You don’t want EOS Utility to start other programs, it just needs to put the pictures in the folder.

3

Configure a Lightroom catalogue for your tethered pictures.

I usually make a new catalogue for tethering or each event. At the end of the event I can export a range of images with their settings as a catalogue for import in to a master ‘all my best stuff’ catalogue back at the office. So create a new catalogue and configure the auto import settings. You need to make sure that the folder your images are arriving in, from EOS Utility, is empty when you initially configure this. Then configure where you want Lightroom to move the files to, and any other presets, or file renaming you wish Lightroom to do. Activate the auto import and you’re done.

valuable benefit of this approach…

With this approach of separating the transfer of images with EOS Utility and the display and importing handled by Lightroom you gain a valuable advantage. At some events if you have a single computer to receive the images being captured and you have someone operating that computer, maybe optimising images, discussing images with clients, or making prints to a dye-sub then they can choose to switch off the auto-import temporarily. Doing so frees up the workstation for the activities of the ‘computer guy’ and it will not interrupt the selling process as new images are captured. Once the ‘computer guy’ has completed his task then it’s a case of enabling the auto import and any new images will be picked up and added to the catalogue ready for display, editing or sale.

This is so useful that when I have done some event work with another colleague we have used this even if we have the camera tethered with a cable. Tether with EOS Utility and let Lightroom do the auto import.

 TIP: minimise EOS Utility

Clicking on the lines at the bottom of the EOS Utility windows will collapse it to the smaller mini window, this is much less obtrusive when you mainly want to show the Lightroom interface on your screen.

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