Wirelessly tethering your camera into Lightroom with an Eyefi MobiPro SD Card

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In a previous blog post, I did a review about the new Eyefi MobiPro SD Card. You might want to read that blog post first before watching this video. One of the conclusions was that for real-life tethered shooting (e.g. in a studio), wirelessly sending over raw files is just too slow (unless you're paid by the hour). So, in this follow-up article, I want to investigate an alternative workflow, which is a lot more efficient. Basically, I use this technique to wirelessly tether my 3 year old Fujifilm X-Pro 1 into Lightroom and it works like a charm! You can pretty much use this technique with most cameras that use SD cards.

The main workflow is as follows:

  1. Set your camera up to shoot raw + JPG
  2. Only transfer the JPG files wirelessly from the Eyefi card to your computer (that's the default Eyefi setup anyway)
  3. Use Lightroom's Auto-Import feature to import the wirelessly transferred JPG files into Lightroom
  4. Make any edits, add star ratings, keywords and pick or reject flags to the JPG files during your tethered shoot
  5. At the end of the shoot, copy the raw files over from the SD card to the same Lightroom folder the jpg files are in, 'the old fashioned way', i.e. manually using Lightroom's regular Import dialog
  6. (And this is the magical part) Have Lightroom automatically synchronise any edits (except for cropping) and metadata from the jpg files to the corresponding raw files, using John Beardsworth's Syncomatic plugin.

That's the short and sweet version. You can get the full lowdown in this video.