Photographer + editor workflow

You shoot; somebody else culls and publishes. ZenTransfer acts like a global tethering rig.

Scenario¶

A photographer is on location. An editor — at the venue press room, in a newsroom, or remote — culls and edits as files arrive. The two need a reliable way to move files from camera to editor's laptop without USB sticks, without an FTP server running on the editor's machine, and without manual upload steps.

Recommended setup¶

• Photographer with camera set up with Zentransfer credentials
• Editor laptop running the Desktop app in Download mode, pointed at a local working folder
• Culling software for the editor to cull, crop, edit, and apply metadata

How Download mode works¶

The Desktop app's Download mode authenticates against your ZenTransfer account and writes every incoming file to a local folder. The editor opens that folder in Photo Mechanic, Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, or whatever culling tool they prefer.

The folder appears the way a tethered shoot's local folder would. The difference is that the camera is somewhere else — in a stadium, on a stage, on a sideline — and ZenTransfer is the cloud bridge.

Why not run an FTP server on the editor's laptop?¶

Some teams used to do this — the camera FTPs directly into a server on the editor's laptop. It fails as often as it works:

• Venue networks block inbound connections to laptops
• Carrier-grade NAT on phone hotspots breaks reachability
• Firewall configuration on the laptop is fragile
• Both photographer and editor need to be on the same network

ZenTransfer Download mode sidesteps all of this — both photographer and editor only need outbound internet.

Powerful variations¶

The editor may be on-site with limited internet access, and need to send to a number of destinations. Instead of sending one-by-one through Photo Mechanic or an FTP software like FileZilla, set up a second ZenTransfer account with all the destinations and let ZenTransfer relay to all destinations in parallel.