Lightroom Tethered Shooting with a Canon R6 MkIII

I’ve bought myself a Canon R6 MkIII, and trying out various options I might use.  

I’ve retired now, but I used to shoot tethered quite a lot for studio work and events.  

Nowadays, I mostly use Lightroom and Photoshop, so you can imagine I was disappointed that I couldn’t get Lightroom to tether to my new R6, despite spending hours on the case. Just now, it doesn’t seem to work. It can control the camera to take a shot, but doesn’t want to transfer the files. I had trouble event trying to make a Watched Folder work.  

I read somewhere that it seems to be because you can no longer see the camera card as an external drive – it relies on a different protocol. I’ve also read that this will all be fixed in some future major update of Lightroom, although there’s no published timetable for this (as of Sept 1st 2016). And yes, I’ve update the firmware, the Mac OS, Lightroom and all the Canon software.  

I have finally found out how to make it work nicely. First of all, use EOS Utility to set up transfer to a folder. There are plenty of videos showing how to do this, so I’m not going to repeat all that.   Next, go to Jeffrey Friedl’s website and download his Folder Watch plugin here: https://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/folder-watch  It was first published in 2009.I used to use this all the time, and, frankly, I’d forgotten all about it. It’s much more clever than the Lightroom functions and, while not quite free, need only cost you literally a cent to use it after a trial run.   Set this up from the Lightroom Plug-in Manager, and it will import nicely from the folder you set up with EOS Utility. Again Jeffery Friedl’s web site tells you how to do it so I’m not going through it all here. Phew – now it all works as you need it to.  

I’ll just copy some of Mr. Friedl’s description, in case that helps explain it.

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This plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic is a feature-rich alternative (or supplement) to Lightroom's built-in tethering and Auto Import, and also attempts to make up for Lightroom's lack of an auto-export facility. It allows you to run a continuous scan of select folders on your hard disk in the background, automatically importing new images in place, or first moving/renaming if you like. It can scan an individual folder, a list of folders, or whole trees of folders. It also allows for automatic processing of imported images, and also automatic export, creating a fully-automatic end-to-end processing system. As a special case to enhance Lightroom's built-in tethering, it can apply special processing to images that have been recently added to Lightroom. This plugin works in Lightroom Classic, and older versions as far back as Lightroom 4 (though some features depend on the version of Lightroom). The same download works for both Windows and Mac.

Canon Wifi Transfer Speeds – Updated for the R6 MkIII

I’ve recently updated my camera to a Canon R6 MkIII, and thought I’d do a quick check on the speed of WiFi transfer. Some considerable time ago, when I was still working as a professional photographer, I carried out a series of experiments with a 5D MkIV and a 6D to see what speeds I could actually get, and whether there was a performance difference. The short answer is that it seemed about the same, for those two bodies at least.

I’ve just done a quick test with my R6 MkIII. I only did a quick transfer of 1 RAW file. Apart from the fact that I am now using a Macbook Air (M1 processor), and the router is an upgraded one, pretty much the same as before.

For the R6, the file was actually 47.8Mb (6960x4640 pixels) – about 50% bigger than the 5D MkIV, although. As far as resolution goes, the R6 is 34.3Mp compared to 30.1Mp for the 5D – only about 14% bigger. I have no idea why there is such a difference between the file sizes given the relatively small difference in resolution. Actually, another RAW file shot a few minutes earlier was only 37.7Mb, so there must be some sort of encoding going on.

 The really interesting thing, though, is that the R6 file transferred in only about 11.43secs. That is to say less than half the time it took for the smaller 5D Raw file. I’m guessing this is because the R6 can use a 6GHz WiFi instead of just a 2.4GHz band.

I’m no longer working professionally, so I’m afraid didn’t bother with repeating the rest of the tests.

 I still wouldn’t use WiFi for transferring RAW files, although it’s OK for jpgs at events. USB cables are quicker and more reliable, although not

In case you find it of interest, I kept the details of my earlier experiments below. Have fun.

First of all, let me say that this was not a proper scientific test. The wifi network is supplied by a BT router downstairs, and I was connecting to an iMac in my office upstairs. There are other bits of hardware on the network, although none especially active at the time. But the signal was good. I used the EOS Utility to transfer the data.

I attached each camera in turn, selected different image qualities (file sizes), and used my phone to measure the time from pressing the shutter to when the file appeared on the computer, ready for use. As I said before, not very scientific (or even accurate) but it gives some idea of what you might get in the field.

Here are the results:

There are some interesting points to note:

There is a “start=up” time of about two and a half seconds or more (I measured 2.69) from pressing the shutter to the transfer actually starting. This is for the camera to call up the computer and the EOS Utility to respond.
After that, the transfer rate is about 0.8 Megabytes per second.
This means that the minimum rate you can get a medium or small jpg file transferred is about 5 seconds. A large 5D JPG is likely to take a bit over 7 seconds.
I did find a couple of anomalies. The 6D LF (Large Fine) transfer was faster than the Medium Fine. This, in turn, was faster than the Small image. I think this was probably because the EOS Utility was still in an active state and hadn’t gone back to sleep. Or it may have been that the computer was busy doing other things at the time. Nevertheless, it seems pretty representative of what you are likely to achieve in a real world situation.
Overall, the wifi capabilities of the 5D Mk IV are more or less the same as the 6D. It does however that the additional ability to link to an FTP server if you don’t want to use the EOS Utility.

Recommendations: No surprises here.  For event photography, most users will be using medium or small jpgs - you don’t need a 30 megapixel image to print an 8x6, or even 10x8 print. The 5D is fine for this. The camera buffers transfers, and I have found the 6D wifi connection to be fine for this use in the past. For studio work, or other situations where you need RAW files, you’re better off shooting RAW + JPG and just transferring the JPG for instant proofing work* - checking lighting and so on - then have a coffee while you transfer a batch of RAW files using a card reader.

This option is cunningly hidden. On the Transfer Utility Remote Shooting window, select the option below the ISO window. You’ll get a second window, like this:

Select the options shown, and Bob's your Mother's Brother!