Canon cameras (and possibly other brands) have built-in Wi-Fi these days. It can be used for file transfer via FTP, but also for tethered shooting. As far as I can see, Darktable currently requires the camera to be attached via USB for tethering to work. Am I missing a way to use Wi-Fi for this? If the feature requires development, which piece of software should I file an issue against?
Nope, it isn’t supported.
TBH I am not even sure where to start. Are you aware of any FOSS apps that support this feature?
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You should probably search on gphoto2 library, that is used for tethering in darktable: http://gphoto.org/
I couldn’t find any.
I’d agree with @Nilvus that asking on the gphoto2 repo is likely the best start, but AFAIK gphoto2 is wired only via USB.
If I had to hazard a guess, connecting wirelessly will be a PITA and likely needs an SDK from canon or similar.
Further digging taught me that gphoto actually already supports Wi-Fi. I managed to talk to the camera, gphoto --port ptpip:$cameraIP --summary works as expected. I’m not sure what to try next to have it show up in Darktable. FWIW I use the flatpak version.
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I don’t know all things behind tethering but if darktable have complete RAW support to read and process your RAW on darkroom, the only thing remaining should be on gphoto2 side (gphoto2 and libgphoto2 parts). I’ve seen that some cameras support some Wifi features or even some USB features, but not all/always. I have a Panasonic G9 for example, and I can communicate with Gphoto2 but tethering (over USB and Wifi) is not supported by gphoto2. So you will need to search on gphoto2 website and GIthub of both Gphoto2 and libgphoto2 (you can search with wifi canon and even your model to be more precise. Be careful too which version of gphoto2 is packaged inside flatpak package of darktable, to see if tethering wifi is supported or not. Possibility to communicate with is a good start but do not mean tethering by wifi is really supported. I can’t help more on that part.
One more point here. Not many users / devs use tethering at all. The libgphoto2 library is pretty tricky to use even for USB devices disconnected / reconnected. Using a wireless connection might be even worse. So very difficult to test properly.