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.