Panasonic phone Apps (click bait title edited)

... With phone apps. Notably Lumix Image App and Lumix Sync.

My daughter likes the GM1 I gave her but man, to transfer her pics to her phone, the way Panasonic intended it. Absolute garbage. I remember toying with it many years ago on my own. But setting it up again, for her, absolute nightmare. Slow, full of errors and failures. After a quick web search, I can see my experience is not unique at all.

I can force the phone to connect but then the app doesn't think it's connected and tries to connect again... Leading to failure, obviously.

Panasonic is not alone in this and all apps from camera manufacturers that I have tried so far have been from bad to worst (Nikon Snapbridge is the least bad).

From early Lumix S9 impressions, it looks like got it's act together on the software/app front.

This has always been an annoyance for me; it seems like no manufacturer can do a proper workflow to make smartphone transfer as seamless as possible. As you said, it seems like Nikon's Snapbridge is the least worst. With my G9 and Panasonic's Image App, it's so hit-and-miss. Sometimes the app properly detects the camera, other times I have to restart the connection.

You sound like you've tried quite a few systems; what do you think is second after Nikon's Snapbridge? I was quite impressed with Snapbridge's auto transfer in particular, it managed to transfer all the images I shot from a Z30 I had for 5 days in the background without a hitch, and without restarting the connection whatsoever.

Panasonic Image App is outdated to the point that I'm surprised it's functional at all. That said, it's only ever given me inconveniences as opposed to real problems. Could be because I use more modern cameras, I imagine.

Very interesting. It works on my GX9, but not on my G100. I don't use it at all because of that. But, glad to see that it's not just me.

Keep in mind that the G100 doesn't support the Panasonic Image App. It needs Lumix Sync instead.

bluevellet said:

... With phone apps. Notably Lumix Image App and Lumix Sync.

My daughter likes the GM1 I gave her but man, to transfer her pics to her phone, the way Panasonic intended it. Absolute garbage. I remember toying with it many years ago on my own. But setting it up again, for her, absolute nightmare. Slow, full of errors and failures. After a quick web search, I can see my experience is not unique at all.

I can force the phone to connect but then the app doesn't think it's connected and tries to connect again... Leading to failure, obviously.

Panasonic is not alone in this and all apps from camera manufacturers that I have tried so far have been from bad to worst (Nikon Snapbridge is the least bad).

From early Lumix S9 impressions, it looks like got it's act together on the software/app front.

Click to expand...

I don't recall if the GM1 does this, but my observation working with both Olympus and Lumix bodies/apps is that often times the problematic piece is with the Bluetooth handshake that occurs, ostensibly, to make it easier to establish a WiFi connection (which is needed to transfer files). So you can try to work around this by "manually" enabling WiFi on the camera, and then"manually" connecting to the camera through the smartphones system settings and only then launching the App. I find this generally works better, more often.

Thankfully this is an area where the latest cameras seem to do a bit better.

Works very well with my GH5. Older cameras may be the problem?

Can't comment if you are using an iPhone.

If you are using an Android phone, I have totally different experience.

Connect a Panny to Android phone is so easy that after the first time connection, it is basically a matter of hitting a key (enable wifi on phone) to connect. But there is a small trick on any Android after ver 9, location must be enabled, otherwise Image App will not connect.

If you really wish to connect your Panny to your phone, please let us know at where you can't proceed) allowing us to help. It should be very very simple and easy.

No need for your flame bait titles.

The GM1 is an 11yo camera.

You make it sound like it's a current model or all models.

Panasonic has never (to my knowledge) released a camera that randomly didn't write pics to the SD card.

I hear about various OM models that have that issue. Much more serious to me.

There, balanced it out a bit.

I installed Panasonic’s Image App (on a first-gen iPhone SE and later an iPhone 13 mini, so not some obscure Chinese Android phone or something) to use with my GH5S … and concluded it was literally unusable. Haven’t touched it in two years.

Of the apps I’ve used (the old and new Sony app, the Panasonic app, and a variety of Olympus apps), OI.Share is, surprisingly, the most useable and reliable.

With my Sony α7C I have to use Imaging Edge, another diabolically bad app. That one establishes a connection about 50% of the time, stalls out mid-transfer about 20% of the time, and when it does work, takes literally two minutes to transfer a single JPEG. Unreal.

Imagine a world where we push one share button on our camera and the image appears in our phone’s photo library in 3 seconds – phone still in pocket – no ifs or buts. Why isn’t this universal? I understand so little of the world.

I have used the Panasonic Image App on both Android and iPhone. It isn't good on either. Maintaining a reliable bluetooth connection appears to be very hard.

Here's hoping that the new App is better and also works with our existing Lumix cameras.

Mark

Mark P Thornton said:

I have used the Panasonic Image App on both Android and iPhone. It isn't good on either. Maintaining a reliable bluetooth connection appears to be very hard.

Here's hoping that the new App is better and also works with our existing Lumix cameras.

Mark

Click to expand...

The Lumix Sync app is working great with my iPhone 13 Pro and Lumix G9ll. It was the other Lumix app that didn't work for me so I just deleted it. Now that one was horrible! The Lumix Sync also does the firmware updates. It takes a minute or so for the phone and camera to connect, but no biggie.

--
Deb

yslee2 said:

You sound like you've tried quite a few systems; what do you think is second after Nikon's Snapbridge? I was quite impressed with Snapbridge's auto transfer in particular, it managed to transfer all the images I shot from a Z30 I had for 5 days in the background without a hitch, and without restarting the connection whatsoever.

Click to expand...

Fuji.

Relatively hassle free


You start the app but you have to go deep in the settings to get the camera going too. No pairing otherwise.


Once connected, it works. But file transfer is super slow. But that could be because my camera (XA3) is just slow. It's even slow at taking pictures (something DPReview also complains about in their review). I don't own any other Fuji camera so maybe file transfers are faster with newer, more powerful models. If that assumption is right then I'd rate it better than the Olympus/OMDS app.

Sam Bennett said:

bluevellet said:

... With phone apps. Notably Lumix Image App and Lumix Sync.

My daughter likes the GM1 I gave her but man, to transfer her pics to her phone, the way Panasonic intended it. Absolute garbage. I remember toying with it many years ago on my own. But setting it up again, for her, absolute nightmare. Slow, full of errors and failures. After a quick web search, I can see my experience is not unique at all.

I can force the phone to connect but then the app doesn't think it's connected and tries to connect again... Leading to failure, obviously.

Panasonic is not alone in this and all apps from camera manufacturers that I have tried so far have been from bad to worst (Nikon Snapbridge is the least bad).

From early Lumix S9 impressions, it looks like got it's act together on the software/app front.

Click to expand...

I don't recall if the GM1 does this, but my observation working with both Olympus and Lumix bodies/apps is that often times the problematic piece is with the Bluetooth handshake that occurs, ostensibly, to make it easier to establish a WiFi connection (which is needed to transfer files). So you can try to work around this by "manually" enabling WiFi on the camera, and then"manually" connecting to the camera through the smartphones system settings and only then launching the App. I find this generally works better, more often.

Thankfully this is an area where the latest cameras seem to do a bit better.

Click to expand...

I have multiple phones (all Android, I'll never support Apple) and 2 Lumix cameras with WIFI capabilities.

I can't even run Lumix Synch on Samsung phones. It just crashes. It does run on my Nothing phone though. But it has the same bottleneck with connecting to the camera.

As stated in the OP, the goal was connecting a phone to a GM1, something that camera, however old, was designed to do. On the off chance somehow the WIFI hardware was broken on the GM1, I used a GM5 to see if it would have the same problem and yes it does. The chances both cameras would have that same specific hardware failure is pretty remote so my assumption is the software, the app itself, is the problem. I can connect both cameras directly to the phone independent of the app or through the app itself (QR code or password), but somehow the app doesn't really think it's connected and tries to establish a connection with a slow progress bar that leads nowhere.

This is not user error.

HOWEVER...

After wasting a lot of time, I could force a real app connection by selecting the remote control option in-camera instead of the file transfer option. Once in remote control with the phone, i could then switch to file transfer. I figure most people would have given up before finding that software loophole.

All the camera apps suck. This is why most people only use a camera phone. Faster, easier, more than good enough.

Until a camera can live stream or post reels by itself - most young people will never bother with them.

bluevellet said:

... With phone apps. Notably Lumix Image App and Lumix Sync.

My daughter likes the GM1 I gave her but man, to transfer her pics to her phone, the way Panasonic intended it. Absolute garbage. I remember toying with it many years ago on my own. But setting it up again, for her, absolute nightmare. Slow, full of errors and failures. After a quick web search, I can see my experience is not unique at all.

I can force the phone to connect but then the app doesn't think it's connected and tries to connect again... Leading to failure, obviously.

Panasonic is not alone in this and all apps from camera manufacturers that I have tried so far have been from bad to worst (Nikon Snapbridge is the least bad).

From early Lumix S9 impressions, it looks like got it's act together on the software/app front.

Click to expand...

The mere idea of wanting to transfer image files from a GM1 via wifi sounds absurd to me.

The GM1 was made 11 years ago. How many new routers have you bought since, how many phones, and why did you replace them? How did your phone look like 11 years ago? Has it ever occurred to you, that the GM1 is the smallest digital ILC camera ever made, and it is a marvel of technology that they even managed to squeeze a basic wifi in there too, and despite it being an all metal camera without an external wifi antenna stick?

GM1 wifi was intended to remote control the camera with a phone over a few meters distance. And as a mere side effect of this, to transfer the occasional jpg picture to the phone or to a printer in a pinch. To transfer several jpg images or the much larger raw files, you have to use the special USB cable that came with the camera. It is much faster and more reliable. Or you can use an SD card reader.

cba_melbourne said:

bluevellet said:

... With phone apps. Notably Lumix Image App and Lumix Sync.

My daughter likes the GM1 I gave her but man, to transfer her pics to her phone, the way Panasonic intended it. Absolute garbage. I remember toying with it many years ago on my own. But setting it up again, for her, absolute nightmare. Slow, full of errors and failures. After a quick web search, I can see my experience is not unique at all.

I can force the phone to connect but then the app doesn't think it's connected and tries to connect again... Leading to failure, obviously.

Panasonic is not alone in this and all apps from camera manufacturers that I have tried so far have been from bad to worst (Nikon Snapbridge is the least bad).

From early Lumix S9 impressions, it looks like got it's act together on the software/app front.

Click to expand...

The mere idea of wanting to transfer image files from a GM1 via wifi sounds absurd to me.

The GM1 was made 11 years ago. How many new routers have you bought since, how many phones, and why did you replace them? How did your phone look like 11 years ago? Has it ever occurred to you, that the GM1 is the smallest digital ILC camera ever made, and it is a marvel of technology that they even managed to squeeze a basic wifi in there too, and despite it being an all metal camera without an external wifi antenna stick?

GM1 wifi was intended to remote control the camera with a phone over a few meters distance. And as a mere side effect of this, to transfer the occasional jpg picture to the phone or to a printer in a pinch. To transfer several jpg images or the much larger raw files, you have to use the special USB cable that came with the camera. It is much faster and more reliable. Or you can use an SD card reader.

Click to expand...

This is nonsense. The WiFi connectivity was one of the reasons I loved my GM1 and dragged it all over the world. In my recollection it worked fine if you connected directly to it. It's a bummer to hear the app support may not be the best anymore, but that's another matter.

Sam Bennett said:

cba_melbourne said:

bluevellet said:

... With phone apps. Notably Lumix Image App and Lumix Sync.

My daughter likes the GM1 I gave her but man, to transfer her pics to her phone, the way Panasonic intended it. Absolute garbage. I remember toying with it many years ago on my own. But setting it up again, for her, absolute nightmare. Slow, full of errors and failures. After a quick web search, I can see my experience is not unique at all.

I can force the phone to connect but then the app doesn't think it's connected and tries to connect again... Leading to failure, obviously.

Panasonic is not alone in this and all apps from camera manufacturers that I have tried so far have been from bad to worst (Nikon Snapbridge is the least bad).

From early Lumix S9 impressions, it looks like got it's act together on the software/app front.

Click to expand...

The mere idea of wanting to transfer image files from a GM1 via wifi sounds absurd to me.

The GM1 was made 11 years ago. How many new routers have you bought since, how many phones, and why did you replace them? How did your phone look like 11 years ago? Has it ever occurred to you, that the GM1 is the smallest digital ILC camera ever made, and it is a marvel of technology that they even managed to squeeze a basic wifi in there too, and despite it being an all metal camera without an external wifi antenna stick?

GM1 wifi was intended to remote control the camera with a phone over a few meters distance. And as a mere side effect of this, to transfer the occasional jpg picture to the phone or to a printer in a pinch. To transfer several jpg images or the much larger raw files, you have to use the special USB cable that came with the camera. It is much faster and more reliable. Or you can use an SD card reader.

Click to expand...

This is nonsense. The WiFi connectivity was one of the reasons I loved my GM1 and dragged it all over the world. In my recollection it worked fine if you connected directly to it. It's a bummer to hear the app support may not be the best anymore, but that's another matter.

Click to expand...

Likely this is because back then, your expectations wrt wifi speed and connectivity were much lower. Today nobody wants to disconnect his phone from wifi internet just to establish a direct connection to a camera, and then back....

And to connect a camera to a wifi network, you need some safety in place else everybody on the network can see or delete your pictures - the GM1 does not have any such safety built in, and even if had it would be obsolete as the last GM1 firmware update was 10 years ago. It would be pretty much as safe as running a laptop with a windows 7 version and no updates ever.

cba_melbourne said:

Sam Bennett said:

cba_melbourne said:

bluevellet said:

... With phone apps. Notably Lumix Image App and Lumix Sync.

My daughter likes the GM1 I gave her but man, to transfer her pics to her phone, the way Panasonic intended it. Absolute garbage. I remember toying with it many years ago on my own. But setting it up again, for her, absolute nightmare. Slow, full of errors and failures. After a quick web search, I can see my experience is not unique at all.

I can force the phone to connect but then the app doesn't think it's connected and tries to connect again... Leading to failure, obviously.

Panasonic is not alone in this and all apps from camera manufacturers that I have tried so far have been from bad to worst (Nikon Snapbridge is the least bad).

From early Lumix S9 impressions, it looks like got it's act together on the software/app front.

Click to expand...

The mere idea of wanting to transfer image files from a GM1 via wifi sounds absurd to me.

The GM1 was made 11 years ago. How many new routers have you bought since, how many phones, and why did you replace them? How did your phone look like 11 years ago? Has it ever occurred to you, that the GM1 is the smallest digital ILC camera ever made, and it is a marvel of technology that they even managed to squeeze a basic wifi in there too, and despite it being an all metal camera without an external wifi antenna stick?

GM1 wifi was intended to remote control the camera with a phone over a few meters distance. And as a mere side effect of this, to transfer the occasional jpg picture to the phone or to a printer in a pinch. To transfer several jpg images or the much larger raw files, you have to use the special USB cable that came with the camera. It is much faster and more reliable. Or you can use an SD card reader.

Click to expand...

This is nonsense. The WiFi connectivity was one of the reasons I loved my GM1 and dragged it all over the world. In my recollection it worked fine if you connected directly to it. It's a bummer to hear the app support may not be the best anymore, but that's another matter.

Click to expand...

Likely this is because back then, your expectations wrt wifi speed and connectivity were much lower.

Click to expand...

No, it's probably because I was shooting JPEG and usually only transferring and handful of files at a time.

cba_melbourne said:

Today nobody wants to disconnect his phone from wifi internet just to establish a direct connection to a camera, and then back....

Click to expand...

I do this all the time - it's really not a big deal. It's the foundation of my concert workflow, since I shoot, pick my favorites, transfer to my phone for quick edits in SnapSeed and send to the marketing team for the club I work for who post literally while the show is still going on.

cba_melbourne said:

And to connect a camera to a wifi network, you need some safety in place else everybody on the network can see or delete your pictures - the GM1 does not have any such safety built in, and even if had it would be obsolete as the last GM1 firmware update was 10 years ago. It would be pretty much as safe as running a laptop with a windows 7 version and no updates ever

Click to expand...

I only ever connect directly to my cameras, so this is a total non-issue.

Sam Bennett said:

cba_melbourne said:

Sam Bennett said:

cba_melbourne said:

bluevellet said:

... With phone apps. Notably Lumix Image App and Lumix Sync.

My daughter likes the GM1 I gave her but man, to transfer her pics to her phone, the way Panasonic intended it. Absolute garbage. I remember toying with it many years ago on my own. But setting it up again, for her, absolute nightmare. Slow, full of errors and failures. After a quick web search, I can see my experience is not unique at all.

I can force the phone to connect but then the app doesn't think it's connected and tries to connect again... Leading to failure, obviously.

Panasonic is not alone in this and all apps from camera manufacturers that I have tried so far have been from bad to worst (Nikon Snapbridge is the least bad).

From early Lumix S9 impressions, it looks like got it's act together on the software/app front.

Click to expand...

The mere idea of wanting to transfer image files from a GM1 via wifi sounds absurd to me.

The GM1 was made 11 years ago. How many new routers have you bought since, how many phones, and why did you replace them? How did your phone look like 11 years ago? Has it ever occurred to you, that the GM1 is the smallest digital ILC camera ever made, and it is a marvel of technology that they even managed to squeeze a basic wifi in there too, and despite it being an all metal camera without an external wifi antenna stick?

GM1 wifi was intended to remote control the camera with a phone over a few meters distance. And as a mere side effect of this, to transfer the occasional jpg picture to the phone or to a printer in a pinch. To transfer several jpg images or the much larger raw files, you have to use the special USB cable that came with the camera. It is much faster and more reliable. Or you can use an SD card reader.

Click to expand...

This is nonsense. The WiFi connectivity was one of the reasons I loved my GM1 and dragged it all over the world. In my recollection it worked fine if you connected directly to it. It's a bummer to hear the app support may not be the best anymore, but that's another matter.

Click to expand...

Likely this is because back then, your expectations wrt wifi speed and connectivity were much lower.

Click to expand...

No, it's probably because I was shooting JPEG and usually only transferring and handful of files at a time.

Click to expand...

Yes a handful jpegs is reasonably fast. I guess 5 to 10 seconds or so for a jpeg.

Sam Bennett said:

Sam Bennett said:

Today nobody wants to disconnect his phone from wifi internet just to establish a direct connection to a camera, and then back....

Click to expand...

I do this all the time - it's really not a big deal. It's the foundation of my concert workflow, since I shoot, pick my favorites, transfer to my phone for quick edits in SnapSeed and send to the marketing team for the club I work for who post literally while the show is still going on.

Sam Bennett said:

And to connect a camera to a wifi network, you need some safety in place else everybody on the network can see or delete your pictures - the GM1 does not have any such safety built in, and even if had it would be obsolete as the last GM1 firmware update was 10 years ago. It would be pretty much as safe as running a laptop with a windows 7 version and no updates ever

Click to expand...

I only ever connect directly to my cameras, so this is a total non-issue.

Click to expand...

It is a big issue for "content creators". But it is not easy to solve.

There are already a few m43 cameras that can do this, Youngnuo has a range of Android m43 cameras, and there is the Alice camera. However they all suffer from a delay after power-on to first load their operating system. The thing is, they receive constant safety and OS updates, just like a phone or tablet or laptop. This is why they can connect to a wifi network safely and with ease. Whereas our conventional cameras only receive sporadic firmware updates when new, and none after a few years old. Making them too risky to allow a shared connection to a wifi network. That is why they can connect point-to-point only.

But I am sure many photographers would love the possibility to transfer their images to the cloud directly from the camera (and even whilst taking more pictures). You would love it too. Right now you have to make a point-to-point connection camera-to-phone. Whilst that is active, your wifi connection from the phone to the internet must be disconnected. Only after you break the camera connection can the phone reconnect to the internet and you can transfer the pics to the cloud (or to your employer or client waiting for the pics to do the post processing).