I’ve had the D850 for a year now and finally got to play with a feature I knew the camera had but had never used…the WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.
Up to this point, I hadn’t needed to mess with that built-in networking functionality because the workflow to get the images off the camera’s memory card always started with loading the pictures into Lightroom using a card reader.
It’s so fast loading directly off the card (particularly with the CFexpress primary card used by the D850) that I’ve never had to think about a wireless offload.
That is, until tonight!
Part of Mother’s Day was spent on a photo shoot with the family at J. C. Raulston Arboretum with Julia’s iPhone alternating with my D850.
The D850 is normally configured so that the RAW images are written to the CFexpress primary card and the JPG camera-processed images are written to the backup SD card.
The problem: without a computer or card reader or any physical connection at all, how can we get the JPGs from the D850 loaded onto Julia’s iPhone?
Enter Nikon Snapbridge!
This nifty app takes advantage of the built-in Bluetooth and WiFi capability of the camera and essentially allows you to tether the camera to the phone so that you could use the phone to remotely control the camera (which might well come in handy for future family portraits!).
But you can also upload the images to the cloud if you choose 2 megapixel rendering or the phone and camera can build a special wireless network connection and upload the full-sized images.
I’ll tell you right now…it ain’t quick!
It took about 45 or so minutes to upload 141 45.7 megapixel JPGs to the phone where the average file size is about 30MB (the RAW images weigh in at about twice that round 55MB).
But it was a darned sight faster getting the full-sized images into her hands this way than it would have been for her to wait about four hours before I got home to my laptop, loaded the RAW images into Lightroom, exported the JPGs to disk, and upload it to Google Drive.
That’s a handy little trick to have but it’s only available with certain Nikon cameras that support Bluetooth/WiFi and of the Nikons I have round here, only the D850 can do that.
That’s OK by me…it’s a rare shoot where the D850 isn’t the primary camera. 🙂