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.

  • @IMALlama
    link
    25 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.