Tetherscript

Connection Issues

Drivers

The software doesn’t require any custom drivers supplied by the camera manufacturer.  Just plug in your camera via USB to your Windows PC and it works.  It has been this way since Windows XP.   Some other camera control apps require third-party USB drivers like WinUSB via the Zadig utility.  These drivers can cause connection attempts to fail.

I cannot connect to the camera. What’s wrong?

Check out the tutorial video for troubleshooting connections.

I still can’t connect. Any other ideas?

Not mentioned on the video is that you can try to uninstall the body drivers in the Windows Control Panel, then turn on the body and wait for it to be auto-detected. Don’t scan for new hardware as this will install the wrong driver. Windows comes with the drivers necessary for connection to all bodies, so you don’t need to download special drivers. See the in-app help on troubleshooting connection issues for more info.

USB 3.0 doesn’t work. Why?

For those bodies that support USB 3.0, turn off your camera and plug it into the USB 3.0 port on your pc. Then go to the Windows Device Manager (in the control panel) and uninstall the body (it’s under Portable Devices’). Wait 10 seconds, then turn on your camera and it should detect the camera and install the drivers that come with Windows (no driver download needed). Then try connecting to it and it should connect just fine.

Note: DO NOT press the ‘Scan for hardware changes’ button as this will often fail to install the driver correctly. It seems that Windows loads a separate driver for each USB version. If you go back to using USB 2.0 on that body, you will need to do this again.

It was working before. Now it won’t connect. Why?

It could be that you installed another program that affected the camera connectivity, but it is more likely that the Microsoft software update has messed up the camera detection in device manager. Check out this helpful tip from from one of our users:

“I thought I would pass on a troubleshooting fix I discovered. Using CMN from one of my laptops (Win7), I suddenly found that CMN would not connect to my D810. There was no reason/explanation on the software end, but doing some digging I found this message in the devices panel: “Windows cannot initialize the device driver for this hardware. (Code 37)” The problem is…there is no driver specific to the D810, and it appeared a fix would require more computer expertise than I possess. However, I found that Microsoft has a “FixIt” tool that solved the problem quickly. All you do is download, run while the camera is tethered, and the software does the rest. Maybe it will help a few of your customers.”

Here is the link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/mats/program_install_and_uninstall

Normally I wouldn’t recommend running a ‘fixit’ or ‘cleaner’ app on your computer, but since this one is from Microsoft, it should be ok.

For Nikon

In early 2016, Nikon released a newer version of the body firmware. Unfortunately, it broke compatibility with older versions of the Nikon SDK which was used by ControlMyNikon 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2. So, you have a newer firmware version and the body won’t connect to ControlMyNikon, you will need ControlMyNikon 5.3. as it uses the latest Nikon SDK which is compatible with their latest firmware.

I have Windows 7 with a D40/D40X/D80/D200 and it won’t connect. Why?

These models have older drivers and Nikon does not provide a Windows 7 driver for them. However, you can get it to work by setting the compatibility mode to ‘Vista SP2’. Just right-click on the shortcut, select properties from the popup menu, compatibility tab, and then select compatibility mode to Vista SP2.

I don’t see PTP mode on my camera. Where is it?

The camera USB mode needs to be set to ‘PTP’ mode. Do not set it to ‘Mass Storage’ mode. Newer cameras such as the D7000 do not have this option and are always set to PTP.