Option to Disable Image Transfer to PC?

[Bill.Richards]

My Canon DSLR onyl has a USB 2.0 interface, so it take several seconds to transfer images from the camera to the PC.  Thinking ahead to the solar eclipse next April, it would be nice to eliminate this wasted time and just have BYE trigger the programmed exposure sequence as fast as possible, leaving the images on the camera.  Is that possible with the current version of BYE?  If not, is that a feature that would be considered for implementation?

I estimate that I could capture twice as many images during the 4 minutes of totality if time was not spent transferring those images to the PC.

[astroman133]

It already does what you are asking.

Just change the "Save To" dropdown list from PC to Camera.

I love BYE for its flexibility and ease of use, but I used a different program to capture the 2017 eclipse. It worked well and had a major feature that BYE does not. It used a capture plan that knew about the times of the various phases of the eclipse and you set different exposures for the different phases and it took care of synchronizing everything with the eclipse timings at the viewing location. It is called Eclipse Orchestrator and is from Moonglow Technologies. Even with saving the images to the SD card, I still had to play around with the timings to make sure that I gave the camera enough time to save one image before starting the next one. I rehearsed my capture plan several times to make sure that I was able to capture each image in the plan.

I hope this helps.

[Bill.Richards]

I knew about that option but I thought that it still transferred the image to the PC so it can be previewed but just didn't save it.  Maybe I got that wrong; I'll look at it again.

Thanks for the tip about Eclipse Orchestrator - I'll check it out.

[astroman133]

A drawback of storing the image only to the camera's SD card is that you lose the ability to preview the image.

[Bill.Richards]

15 minutes ago, astroman133 said:

A drawback of storing the image only to the camera's SD card is that you lose the ability to preview the image.

Yes, but the plan is to take a few exposures, preview them to get the histogram right, then run multiple exposure bracketing sequences without needing to preview them.

[astroman133]

Believe me, when close to totality, there will not be time for trying to determine the correct exposure or for running bracketing  sequences. The conditions (brightness) are changing too quickly. When not near totality, the exposures would be the same as if you went out today and shot the sun. Also, I found plenty of guidance regarding suggestions for what exposures to use for the near-totality phases. The trickiest for me was getting the "diamond ring" right.

[Bill.Richards]

10 hours ago, astroman133 said:

Believe me, when close to totality, there will not be time for trying to determine the correct exposure or for running bracketing  sequences. The conditions (brightness) are changing too quickly. When not near totality, the exposures would be the same as if you went out today and shot the sun. Also, I found plenty of guidance regarding suggestions for what exposures to use for the near-totality phases. The trickiest for me was getting the "diamond ring" right.

I was in Jackson Hole for the 2017 eclipse, so I have experience with photographing an eclipse.  Back then, I did it all manually which was painful.  This time around, I want to use BYE to do the heavy lifting.  I have a sequence already programmed with various exposure times to capture the brightest areas around the rim all the way down to the faintest coronal trails.  So I only need to do a single sanity check and then let it fly.  But I want to capture as many exposure as possible, and that means NOT wasting time transferring images to the PC.

[astroman133]

OK, good luck on your project.

[cuyeda]

On 9/20/2023 at 8:49 AM, Bill.Richards said:

I was in Jackson Hole for the 2017 eclipse, so I have experience with photographing an eclipse.  Back then, I did it all manually which was painful.  This time around, I want to use BYE to do the heavy lifting.  I have a sequence already programmed with various exposure times to capture the brightest areas around the rim all the way down to the faintest coronal trails.  So I only need to do a single sanity check and then let it fly.  But I want to capture as many exposure as possible, and that means NOT wasting time transferring images to the PC.

Bill,

I am also want to capture the eclipse in April 2024. Would you be willing to share you sequence work flow file with me to get an idea. I realize it will depend on the camera and lens you are using. I am starting from scratch to try and make this work. If you could send it to: cuyeda@outlook.com that would be appreciated. Thankyou.

[Bill.Richards]

I'll send you the details privately, but I ultimately decided against using BYE because of this limitation.  You just cannot capture images fast enough when the software insists on transferring every image to the PC.  It's really a shame that this cannot be disabled.

[astroman133]

BYE has always had an option to save images only to the camera's memory card and not download them to the PC.

The "Save To" dropdown allows you to select PC, Camera, or PC+Camera as your choice for the capture plan. That said,  BYE is not optimized for eclipse photography like other apps such as Eclipse Orchestrator.

[Bill.Richards]

Hmmm...  When I tried that, it still seemed to transfer the image and display it on the PC.  It may not save it on the PC, but the transfer still seemed to be taking place.

[astroman133]

That is not my experience.

When I select Save To Camera, the image is not downloaded and either saved or displayed (no thumbnail) as there is with Save To PC. Also there is noticeably less delay between exposures with Save To Camera, because there is no image download. I am still using the fast SD card that I bought for the 2017 eclipse. The speed makes a difference!

[admin]

Save to Camera will *NOT* download anything to the PC.

[admin]

This said, I have a few users who have reported that settings are not saved using the 64 bits version, I had this happen to me once as well. I ran the app with admin right and then they saved. This is not ideal, and there is nothing in BYE/BYN that requires admin rights, but for some reason, Windows in all its glory, won't save the settings on some installation without admin right

Try it, I suspect that if you changed your setting to PC only and the images are still saved, that the setting itself did not take effect because of the above

 

[astroman133]

If the user changes the setting  from PC to Camera and then exits and restarts BYE and the selected save location reverts to PC then the change was not saved.  However, I would expect that until BYE exits and while the selected destination is Camera, BYE should not download the image, but cause it to be saved to the camera's memory card.

Perhaps it might help to trap the error when attempting to save settings and display a dialog with information about why the error occurred. I would have said to log the error, but if there are Windows file/directory permissions issues on the PC it is possible that there may not be any log files.