One of the reasons I bought the new Canon s120 compact digital camera was so I could wirelessly transfer photos from the camera to my iPhone. Why? Social media, of course. Instagram, baby. And Snapchat. But I’m baffled with the whole wifi thing. Help!
Camera companies like Canon are really good at making amazing cameras, but when it comes to all the tech behind the scenes, well, they might need to poach an engineer or two from Apple or Google to really get things right. The company tries, but as with previous generations of “on-board wi-fi”, the Canon s120 is a bit baffling in terms of getting things set up and working properly, and if you’re looking to transfer photos from you camera directly to your Mac OS X system (Macbook, iMac, etc) then you might or might not be out of luck: The Web site suggests that the required app is available for Mac, but when you try to download it, it seems not to exist.
Fortunately your interest is with your iOS device, which is easier to work with. First step you’ll need to do is download the right app from Canon. Turns out that there are two that you can use: Canon Camera Connect or Canon CameraWindow. The latter is more powerful (it lets you remotely control the camera itself!) but is obsolete (!!), replaced by the former, which is a bit easier to work with, so I’ll demonstrate with Camera Connect in this tutorial.
It’s important to realize that there are also two ways that your iPhone and your S120 can connect with each other: the camera can act as its own access point — with you manually switching the iPhone onto that wi-fi network — or they can find each other on a network they’re both connected to, like your home or office network. Connecting to a Wi-Fi network or switching between connection points is super frustrating and a point where Canon really does need those user experience engineers too, so you’ve been warned!
To start, you need to know how to get to Wi-Fi mode on the Canon S120 camera in the first place, because it’s not so obvious. To start, here’s the camera setting up a shot:
Look closely at the top portion of the control dial on the right. Just above “Func. Set” it shows a blue wifi icon and a box split between “+” and “-“. Got it? That’s what you want to press on.
But nooooooot quite yet. Instead, you need to switch into photo review mode by pressing on the “>” button just below the control dial. Now you can press the Wi-Fi button (e.g., the top portion of the dial) to get here:
At this point I can hear what you’re thinking: Um, what? Where’s the settings option? How do I connect to an existing network from this point? What are all these darn icons?
All valid questions. From the top left, it’s a camera for camera-to-camera transfers (not really sure what the value of that feature is, but that’s okay), a smartphone for mobile device connectivity, a laptop for camera-to-laptop connections, and, on the second row, wireless printer connectivity and the cloud. Not Dropbox, OneDrive or Facebook, though, Canon’s own cloud sharing facility called Canon Web Link.
Tip: If you do want to work with Canon Web Link, you’ll need to set things up at canon.com/cig/, and once you do, you can connect directly to Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive and Flickr, though it’s a bit of a twisty path.
Since you want to connect to your Apple iPhone running, presumably, iOS 9, tap on the mobile device icon.
Obviously you want to “Add a Device…” so tap on that.
Now you’ll see what’s next on this journey:
Meanwhile, on your iPhone, you’ve hopefully launched Camera Connect and it’s sitting, spinning too:
Now’s when you need to decide whether you’re going peer-to-peer, where the camera is its own wifi base station, or whether you want them to share an existing wifi network. On the camera, when there’s no connection, you’ve probably already bumped into this screen:
In this instance, I can create a peer-to-peer network by choosing “Camera Access Point Mode“, in which case the PowerShot s120 will create a wifi network and I’ll just have to choose that network from the iPhone’s Settings app to proceed. To choose an existing network instead, find it on the menu (“floyds-guest” is an example network, above) and enter the password, etc, as needed.
Note that if the network has a login page like a typical Starbucks network, the PowerShot s120 can’t deal with it and you will not be able to get online. Why? Because it doesn’t actually have a web browser. Frustrating!
Once you have both camera and iPhone on the same Wi-Fi network, or use the camera to create a network, you’ll have this lovely next step on the camera:
Looks good! Select it by tapping on the choice or pressing “Func. Set” on the control dial.
One more confirmation is needed:
Yeah, tap “Yes”.
Now you’ll have all the control on the camera itself:
If you want, you can tap “Send this image” to push an image — or a set of images with the “Select and send” alternative — to the iPhone.
But more importantly, you’ll see this on the iPhone in the Canon app:
Connected! Not much fanfare, but that’s okay…
Now, tap on “Images on camera” on the iPhone and watch what happens on the screen:
The connection is live! Now you can tap on an image to view it — or easily save it on your mobile device.
For example:
That’s how it works. You can push photos from the camera onto your mobile device or you can “pull” them from the Canon app on your iPhone or other smartphone. Pretty slick, once you get it all working!
Hey am Dhani , I have problem with wifi canon s120, I try to connect to mobile, not working , have the message from camera ” a camera error detected will shut down automatically restart camera e60″ . Please help me, if someone know how to fix. Thank
I have the same problem. Do you fix it ?
I have the same problem, is there any solution to this?
Nice write-up!
One nitpick– don’t you have it backwards? It’s Cameraa Connect that has the remote abilities (for some models and with only certain features) not Camera Window.
The use of “latter” there seems off!
THANK YOU Vizzpat. Changing to Airplane mode was the saving grace. You should get a raise – or a free iPhone!
I use both the Canon and Nikon iOS apps to establish a WiFi connection between my cameras and my phone. I find it helpful to turn on Airplane mode in settings and then turn on the WiFi option before attempting to get a reliable WiFi transfer connection between my camera and my phone. I used to have to make several attempts before the Canon or Nikon WiFi connection would actually work. For some reason, it always connects on the first try in Airplane mode with WiFi on.