Setting up the Impulse Photographer app

In this guide we'll walk through how to connect your camera to a phone to take advantage of the real-time photo upload with the Impulse Photographer app.

Overview

The Impulse app lets you hard-wire your camera to your phone which will then receive the pictures as soon as they are taken and transfer them to the Impulse cloud.

This guide assumes your camera is already wired up to your phone, if that is not the case checkout this guide

The Impulse Photographer app is currently only available on Apple devices. If you do not have an iPhone or are using one the Impulse kits, try one of these guides:

• Using the Canon Content Transfer app

• Using the Nikon NX MobileAir app

Camera compatibility

Before we get started, you'll have to make sure your camera is compatible with the Impulse app. Head to the Camera Compatibility page to check if your model is compatible, make sure it says "Compatible with Impulse app".

If your camera is not compatible don't worry! You can always upload your picture from our web interface, setup a Google Drive, Dropbox folder or do regular SD card drops to the SFTP. Checkout this guide to know more.

Download the app the on Apple App Store

Note that you can use this app on Mac laptops to transfer files from SD cards (or the computer itself) if needed, checkout this guide for more info

Configuring your camera

There are a few things you might need to adjust in the your camera settings:

• Make sure to shoot in JPEG, the app will not transfer RAW files.

  • If you are shooting only for Impulse we recommend setting your "Image quality" setting to no RAW, only Medium smooth JPEG

  • If you require RAW or big JPEGs for post-processing, the app will automatically ignore RAW files so you can shoot in RAW+JPEG. Be mindful of upload speed: shooting big JPEGs will take significantly more time to upload.

• Make sure your camera has at least 1 SD card. The app will not work if the camera doesn't have an SD card.

• If you have trouble connecting your camera to the app, checkout the Troubleshooting USB connectivity guide

Configuring the app

Before being able to use the app you need to be added as a photographer to the Impulse event. If that's not the case, reach out to your Impulse contact, or add it in the "Contributors" tab of the Impulse webapp.

Login using the email that was added to the event. If you are using "Login with Apple" and you did not share your email, you have to logout and log back in using a method that let's use know what your email is (otherwise we can't tell that you're you)

If you've been invited to multiple Impulse events, you might see this page

Select the event you want to photograph for and click continue

Tip 1: If you've used the app for an event before, it will most likely still be set to that event when you open it again! You can change which event you're uploading to in the settings page (gear icon at the top right), click "Change event"

Tip 2: If you see a page saying you do not have any event, you probably logged in with a different email than the one that was added by your event admin

Once you select an event you should see this screen, in addition to a few permission dialogs (Local network access, USB port access): make sure to accept all of them or the app will not be allowed to connect to the camera

You can now plug your camera to the phone and wait a few seconds, the camera model should show up like this

If you do not see your camera in the list try some of these:

• Unplug/replug the cable while the camera is on

• Turn off/on the camera while the cable is connected

• Kill and restart the Impulse app

• For a more detailed guide, checkout the Troubleshooting USB connectivity guide

Click on your camera in the list and if everything goes well you will end up on this screen

From there the app will remember your camera and you won't need to do the previous steps again (unless you want to in which case you can click "Change camera" in the setting menu at the gear icon on the top right)

That it! You could start shooting and the app will automatically upload your pictures to Impulse, but there are a few things you need to know to take full advantage of the app:

• The app will always automatically download pictures from the camera and store them on the device. This means you can shoot in areas with no connectivity and then come back to an area with connectivity and the app will already have all the pictures ready to upload.

• To help with managing uploads you can use the "Auto upload" toggle: when turned on the app will constantly try to upload the files to the Impulse cloud, which may lead to warnings and errors when you lose connectivity (that's ok! you can always retry uploads by restarting the app), but if you turn it off the app will just download images from the camera and wait until the toggle is back on to upload them to the cloud.

• By default the app only looks for pictures taken today on the camera, so you can have a partially full SD card without having the app try to upload all of it. You can change which pictures get uploaded in the settings page at the gear icon on the top right under "Sync pictures on camera from"

If the camera get disconnected or turned off, you can reconnect it at any time and the app should pick back up where it was. If something is not working try restarting the app or the camera.