Sports and press photo delivery from the sideline: FTP, captions and the wire workflow

Short answer: in a wire-style workflow the photographer shoots, tags only the frames that matter (by protecting or rating them in camera), and the camera sends those frames by FTP, usually as JPEGs, to an editor or agency server within seconds. A remote editor crops, tones, captions and publishes. The camera's built-in FTP over venue Ethernet is the professional standard. Phone-based routes, from the camera makers' pro apps to tethering apps such as CloudTether, fill the gap when there's no venue network or the pictures need to go somewhere other than an FTP server.

How the wire workflow works

Lexar's profile of Olympic photographer Candice Ward is a clear example. She protects or rates only the top 1–5% of her frames in camera. When she's plugged into a venue's Ethernet line, her camera sends every tagged image by FTP as soon as the shutter closes. An off-site editor receives the high-resolution JPEGs, crops and tones them in Photo Mechanic, and writes the caption: who, what, where, when and why. Team Canada's Instagram often posts a picture within three to five minutes of a win. Edited files go to a central archive that sponsors, federations and athletes download from.

Three ideas carry over to any sideline, from the Olympics to a Saturday league:

• Tag, don't dump. Sending a few chosen frames beats uploading a card of unedited bursts.
• JPEG for the wire. Editors need a good JPEG now; the RAW files can wait on the card.
• Somebody captions. A picture without a caption is hard to find and slow to publish.

The networks you'll file over

FTP, FTPS or SFTP?

Plain FTP sends your password and pictures unencrypted. FTPS adds TLS encryption to FTP, and SFTP runs over SSH and is a different protocol altogether. Many recent cameras now offer the secure options: Sony's α7R VI offers FTPES and SFTP, Nikon's Z6 III supports FTPS, and Canon's EOS R6 Mark III supports FTPS. If the agency's server offers SFTP, use it. Our glossary entry on SFTP and FTP photo delivery go deeper.

Captions and metadata

Agencies work in IPTC metadata, the standard fields that travel inside the image file: headline, caption, creator, credit line, copyright, location and date. Fill what you can before kick-off, because once play starts there's no time:

• Load an IPTC preset in camera if your body supports it, with your name, credit, copyright and the fixture.
• Use the maker's pro app. Sony Transfer & Tagging supports caption templates, glossaries and IPTC presets; Canon's Content Transfer Professional adds IPTC and NewsML-G2 metadata and can store up to 20 FTP servers. Canon's app is sold as a subscription; check current terms for both.
• Let the desk caption. On big events a remote editor writes the full caption; your job is to get frames to them fast with your credit already embedded.

Where CloudTether fits, honestly

CloudTether is not a captioning tool and not a replacement for a camera wired into the press box. Where it helps is the much larger world of sideline work without a venue network: a regional league, a stringer filing to a local paper, a club photographer feeding the social team, a youth tournament where parents want pictures before they leave.

Tether the camera to a phone over USB and each frame is copied off and delivered over the phone's mobile data. CloudTether delivers to SFTP, FTPS and FTP servers, retries for a while if the server is briefly unreachable, and checks the file size on the server after an SFTP upload before counting it as delivered. In app 1.1 you can turn off the per-shoot subfolder so photos land in one exact ingest folder. Sign-in is by username and password; SSH keys aren't supported yet. The same frame can go to the agency's server, the club's Google Drive and the social team's Slack from one upload.

Two features stand in for tagging: JPEG only, which leaves the RAW files on the card, and, on Canon and Nikon, sending only the frames you rate in camera. On Sony and Fujifilm every frame is sent. Verified bodies include the Canon EOS R7 and R5 Mark II, Nikon Z6 and Sony ZV-E10; other pro bodies such as the Canon EOS R3 and Nikon Z9 run the same code but aren't tested by us.

A sideline checklist

• Ask the agency for the server type, port, folder and whether it wants a subfolder per match.
• Test an upload from the car park, not at kick-off.
• Set JPEG size and quality to what the desk asks for.
• Embed your credit and copyright before you leave home.
• Carry a power bank for the phone and spare camera batteries.
• Know your plan B: if the mobile network chokes at a full stadium, frames queue on the phone and send when it clears.

More on tethering to your own SFTP or FTP server, the FTP destination and CloudTether for press photographers.