Quickest way of shooting tethered with your Fuji X-T1, X-T2 and GFX50s (windows only)
- Windows 10
- Fujifilm X-Acquire (download: http://www.fujifilm.com/support/digital_cameras/software/x_acquire/win/)
While there is a big point in simply using Lightroom with its builtin feature AutoImport the goal of FujiTether is to display your photos as quickly as possible. If timing is of utmost importance and you can live with doing all the cataloging stuff after the photoshoot this script is for you.
I analyzed the photo transfer of X-Acquire and it is really fast! What takes long when using Lightroom is all the processing that is done:
- importing to the catalog
- keywording the photo
- setting metadata
- rendering previews
This is what I roughly measured with a stopwatch:
- X-Acquire transfers a JPG in under 3sec to your computer (not much slower when using USB 2.0)
- Lightroom takes 4sec to finally display the image
- FujiTether takes 0.3sec to display the image
There's not much to do to get FujiTether running.
If you've downloaded and installed X-Acquire from the Fujifilm website, configure it once to your liking. Run FujiTether by right-clicking the main file (FujiTether.ps1) and choosing Run with Powershell. FujiTether will figure out where files are uploaded to and poll this folder 4 times a second (=250msec) for new photos. New files are moved to a subfolder FujiTether and the latest JPEG will be displayed in fullscreen using Windows' onboard Photo Viewer in fullsreen mode.
This is what makes FujiTether so fast and efficient: high speed polling and instant display.
- I choose to transfer JPEG only if speed counts and/or I'm using a USB 2.0 cable
- I choose to transfer JPEG+RAW if I want to work with all images right away after the photo shoot and/or I'm using a USB 3.0 cable (transfer of JPEG+RAW is not much slower than JPEG only)
- I always save JPEG+RAW to my camera for backup reasons
FujiTether is a 1-click solution setting up Tethered Shooting right away. If you run the tool everything else will run with it. No need to run X-Acquire and no need to setup anything else. Setting up a tethered photoshoot couldn't be quicker.
There are some variables that you can tweak within the source code.
- $FujiXAcquire: specify path to Fuji X-Acquire executable (if you installed to a different folder)
- $watchIntervalInMsec: specify the polling interval (250msec did not slow down my Surface Pro 4 at all)
- $storeFolder: specify a different folder to store final images in