Tethered Shoot in Lightroom Part 1

What You’ll Need - you probably already have it.

Camera: We’ll use Nikon and Canon for examples in this article.

USB cable connecting your camera to your computer: You should have received one in the box when you bought your camera. Chances are that it’s still in the box.

Some type of tethered shooting software: Your camera needs to be connected to the computer, and your computer needs some software on it to pull off the photos from the camera. (Lightroom doesn’t do this part.) Nikon users can download Camera Control Pro while Canon users can download EOS Viewer (you can use Capture also)

Computer with Lightroom installed and an unused USB port. The computer should be booted and ready to go.

Below is a explaination of the USB modes you have on your camera and which option you need to select in camera.

In the mass-storage class mode, the camera simply appears to the computer as a simple card reader. You can move files back and forth from the camera as desired, but it can't do anything beyond this. Since the MSC was part of the original USB spec, pretty much every OS that supports USB will be able to natively access the camera in this mode without any drivers.

When the camera is in the PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) mode, it appears to the computer as a camera. As such, asside from basic file transfer tasks it allows you to remotely control the camera (fire the shutter, change exposure, etc.) as well as use various advanced features (custom curves, additional settings, etc.). Generally speaking most PTP drivers will also mount the camera's memory card, so you'll have all the functionality of MSC as well.

With that said, PTP is a newer protocol than MSC so it is not quite as well supported at the OS level. With OSes prior to Windows XP, for instance, you will need to install a driver to access the camera when used in this mode. This isn't generally a huge deal as the cameras usually come with a driver disk, however if you're at a client's office and don't have them on hand the MSC mode can come in handy.

Basically speaking, the MSC mode is simply there for compatibility purposes. If your machine has support for PTP, then that's the protocol that you want to use ;)

That's Part 1 complete.

Job Done.