Nikon Z6 and SnapBridge Android Woes

I have a Nikon Z6 and an Android phone. I installed the SnapBridge app from GooglePlay and paired the devices.

 

Here is what I would like to happen:

 

1) I'd like my phone to be connected when I am ordinarily using the camera without having to specifically connect it, in order to place a GPS location in the photos.

 

2) I'd like all of the images I take to automatically download to a folder in my phone's external SD card in the background, so that I can post them to social media and/or send them in a message, ideally at a low resolution (2 megapixel?)

 

3) On rare occasions, I'd like to be able to download a full, high resolution version of a few selected images.

 

In theory SnapBridge supports each of these functions. But in practice I find they barely work.

 

To get the GPS coordinates in my photos, I find I need to specifically start the SnapBridge app on my phone, even though I've left it to run in the background, and wait a while to make sure they are actually connected. At times, I find I need to restart my phone entirely! And even when it works, I'm never 100% sure that the camera remains successfully paired.

 

I've set the images to auto download at 2MP via Bluetooth. Even if the devices are right next to each other, I find this takes many hours, in fact, often takes over night or over several nights, even for a just a couple hundred images. It also completely runs the battery of the camera down. I bought a third-party AC adapter for my Z6, but as slots into the battery port, the Z6 rejects it as a non-compliant third-party battery. (My D700 just has a port for an AC adapter, no monkeying-around with a faux battery required). I would even purchase the genuine AC adapter except that it was out of stock everywhere I looked when I tried to purchase it.

 

I can connect via peer-to-peer WiFi (temporarily disabling the WLAN connection on my phone), which is much faster, but that only seems to be for manually selecting images to transfer. If I select all, it will download all the previously downloaded images again leaving duplicates on my phone. If I want to select only untransferred images I have to select each one, one-by-one, since SnapBridge doesn't have a "quick select" function, where you can hold and drag across many images to select them at once. So to use WiFi I basically have to transfer images, then connect my camera to my laptop, transfer the full-resolution images, and then delete them from my camera.

 

It would be fine if it would transfer via WiFi when I'm at home on my own WiFi access point, as long as it happens automatically.

 

I've disabled all power saving options on both SnapBridge and the camera, which is fine with me. However, sometimes even when there are no untransferred images, I find that my camera's battery is completely drained. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe I was careless and left camera on during that time (I don't think so, but possibly?), but shouldn't it time out anyway? I have a strong suspicion that SnapBridge is responsible for the errant battery drain. Any idea what's going on?

 

The only functionality that seems to work as I'd like is my third, and rarest, use case: downloading a couple specific images at high resolution. But even this hampered by the poor browser in the SnapBridge application.

 

And why is Bluetooth transfer so slow anyway? Even Bluetooth 1.0 should support 700 Kbps, which means a 500 KB photo (average size for a 2 MP photo) would transfer in 6 seconds. Surely the Z6 and my two-year old phone are both operating with at least Bluetooth 2.0 anyway.

 

Am I doing something wrong or missing something? This really feels like barely usable software to me.

You are good. I can't even get it to pair with my IPhone successfully. Hwvr, this is a not as important to me. I think one of these days Apple or Nikon will make this all work. :-)

My Z6 is snapbridged to my Goggle Pixel 2. It seems that they automatically "re-pair" when one or the other has been off.

 

I found that the 2MB images loaded fairly quickly to the default cloud location through the phone, and were easy to share, though I did so with text and email, I don't do the social media thing.

 

I have not tried some of the other features that you want to work, maybe I will. I can see the usefulness of some of those features.