Does anybody have experience with tethering?
What I want to do:
What I have:
What I need:
Can it do what I want it to do? And what and how does it work?
Tethering does not work in general. It might in well-chosen cases. Right now it works for my Nikon D5300 but not for my D810, for example (libgphoto2 version 2.5.27). One year ago, the D810 used to work.
darktable only provides a GUI over the GPhoto2 lib, which is brittle and fails randomly depending on updates. It is prone to unexpected disconnections and it can get really tricky to get the camera to connect again.
Also, the desktop live view has the same resolution as the backscreen live view, so all you have is bigger pixels.
All in all, it doesn’t pass my requirements for “usable”. We had to buy the license for http://digicamcontrol.com/ on Windows to get something remotely acceptable.
Sorry, DigiCamControl was the next one we tried before settling for Smart Shooter 4 | Tether Tools. DigiCamControl also had disputable stability.
Thanks, I will keep that in mind for when I have a bit of spare time in 2025. Meanwhile, happy to pay for something that just works.
I wish tethering worked better until linux, and, specifally under darktable. And… Wifi tethering is coming to more cameras: right now it seems to be a feature on the “flagship” cameras, like the Sony A1 and Nikon Z9, but it would be a great feature for tabletop and studio work.
I would offer to get off my ass and look at it for darktable, but I then remembered all of the chat re: ARM and darktable, which I would still like for travel/street work. I played with some compiles, but then work became busy again. I’ll work on that first, then perhaps come back to this.
I used command-line gphoto2 in a script to automate capturing my spectrum and calibration images for camera profiling. Worked fine with a D5300, D7000, and Z 6.
FWIW…
No problems here tethering my D750 and Z6ii. Haven’t tried my D750 on the latest darktable master but it worked before, I did test my Z6ii a few weeks back on the, then, latest master.
I’m on Debian, ghpoto is installed an I don’t have to do anything special to make this happen.
The last time I tried it worked fine with https://entangle-photo.org/ but not with darktable. (Nikon D7000) Both use gphoto.
Entangle works with both cameras flawlessly. Out of the box. Perfect. Thanks for reminding me.
I had heard the name “entangle” maybe years before, so I followed your link to … what? I mean … kids … what keeps the maintainer from spending an hour and come up with something that REMOTELY looks like a post 1994 website? Like something giving the impression that at least a single second of thought had been given to complicated words with many syllables like “usability” or “comprehensiveness” or … any other stupid try to make an important sounding noun out of an attribute.
In the end I got it. Somewhere in the fine print in a box that started with a reference to Flathub (this is where I generally stop reading) I found a hint that maybe entangle could be in the repos of my distro. I will not go into details nor will I dwell on the very unusual command line suggestion, but … I found it in the end, I installed it and it worked like a charm.
PLEASE - if you spend energy in coding and providing good software for us, if you make life for photographers better with the program you are working on - PLEASE add an hour or two and document the software with a webpage or website that we (the users, not the IT pros) can understand and draw information from. Add screenshots, add a how-to and think about a structure.
I am thankful for the excellent work of everyone contribution to FOSS, for everything that enables me to pursue my photography hobby (well … it’s way more than that). Really. Please think of us as users - not as IT pros and make your page or site for photographers, not for programmers.
We can only say THANKS A LOT!
I know myself how irritating a bad or inexistent documentation can be, always from an end user point of view.
It’s not enough saying «it’s in the code». No, it’s not. We are end users, not programmers or people with enough degrees to understand anything thrown at us.
HOWEVER: I couldn’t disagree more with sentences like «add an hour or two and document the software».
Just try it for yourself. Write a simple How to get started page for Entangle (or any other software you wish), with:
Now leave it as it is for a couple days and then return back to it and try to follow your explanations with the software at hand.
Now you will understand that some people brains are not made to explain things, but just to create them. We, users, can help them to fill the gaps for everybody to enjoy a thoroughful experience (if possible with the help of the programmers).
But please, don’t think for just a second that writing good documentation and presenting it to the world is a matter of a couple hours.
That’s why we have @patdavid and @paperdigits doing hugo pages for projects now. Just think about all the pages with a pixls.us in the footer. 
I have not done long session of tethering with darktable but my experience is that when it works it works pretty well (I have a D850 and tested also with a D800). Some recent enhancement have been made also in dt to have a better stability with the gphoto interfacing. Not ideal, but for a 1h session it seems to work ok on my side. Also I do test the support in dt from time to time when PR are proposed and never had bad issues (sometime I need to disconnect and reconnect for the camera to be recognized on initial setup).
And anyone is welcome to contribute content or enhancements to those docs. If someone wants to reach out to Entangle to see if they want website help, that’s be great.
But it certainly isn’t as easy as “just another hour or two” as @beachbum thinks it is. It isn’t even an hour or two for me, and I’d consider myself very familiar with Hugo/markdown/git/web packages.
This might not be an answer to your question. I don’t have a remote control yet.
D610 and D810 are listed in libgphoto2 as supported camera for Image Capture, Trigger Capture, Liveview and Configuration.
This is how I connected my D7500 to Ubuntu 22.04. Hope someone might later find this useful.
