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.

  • hankeOP
    3·
    6 days ago

    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@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 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@lemmy.world
      2·
      5 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@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 days 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.