Tethered shooting software

Sat, 09/01/2007 - 21:21 — Alan

When going through the review of photography sofware for Digial Asset Management and RAW image manipulation, I found varying levels of support for tethered shooting. OS X provides for a certain level of integration between camera and applications through its folder actions, scripting and workflow capabilities. Many of the software packages use these capabilities without having direct control.

It's not now possible to give a detailed account of the functionality available since I don't have some of the software packages installed anymore and it's not worth purchasing fully-licensed versions of them all when they overlap with each other so much. So it's worth doing some of your own research as well. Recounting from memory:

Adobe Lightroom can do it with watched folders. There are many requests (even after version 1.1 was released) for additional functional to handle tethered shooting. It's slightly clunky but it works.

I've shown how you can do tethered shooting with iPhoto and I'm sure there are better ways of doing it. The comment left on an earlier post may prove useful to people looking for this. It's clunky, but it works.

There are some good folder actions and scripts for handling photos in Apple's Aperture. Some of these can be adapted for other software applications. This is neater than the two applications above.

Bibble Lab's Bibble Pro advertises tethered shooting but not for Nikon D80 and similar on OS X. Look in the forum and there are a number of posts on the subject.

I couldn't find any specific functionality in Lightcraft's Lightzone for tethered shooting. I guess you could use folder actions and import that way, perhaps having to automate a refresh/rescan of the folder if that's possible. It would seem that you'd have to write more integration to get it to work. Better still use Lightzone as an editor and something else to control the tethered shooting.

The next step I'd like to see is remote camera control so you can alter the focus, aperture, shutter speed, etc. For the moment, you'd have to go to your camera manufacturer for software to do that.