Tethered shooting as its own module: connect a camera over USB and shoot straight into your catalogue. For a start-to-finish walkthrough, see Tethered capture.
Open Capture with (⌥⌘2) or . With a supported camera connected by USB, each frame you shoot lands in your catalogue automatically. Capture is a licensed feature — see Licensing.
Only one app can hold the camera at a time, so quit Lightroom, Image Capture and Photos first, and if the camera prompts you, allow the PC/accessory connection. If the camera won't appear, see Troubleshooting → a camera won't connect.
The module shows one of three states: connecting while it looks for a camera, ready once tethered (with the live tether bar and preview), and failed if it can't establish a connection, with what to try next.
When ready, the tether bar sits over the canvas with: the camera settings controls, the shutter button to fire a frame from the Mac, a full-screen (⤢) toggle for the preview, and an eject to end the session.
The controls read and write the camera's exposure settings live — ISO, aperture, shutter speed, white balance and exposure compensation — so you can adjust from the Mac without touching the body. Exactly which controls appear depends on what the camera exposes.
The camera's live viewfinder streams onto the canvas so you can frame and focus from the screen — verified on the Nikon D4S. Press F for a full-screen preview, handy for a client or subject to see.
Below the canvas, the session bar controls where and how captured frames are filed: the session name, the file naming template and numbering, the destination folder, and an Add to Library toggle. A More… popover holds the rest, including options to apply keywords or add captures to a collection as they come in.
horizontally flips the Capture preview, so a subject facing the screen sees a natural mirror image — useful for a photobooth-style setup. It affects only the Capture preview, not Library or Develop.
So far the Nikon D4S is the only body hardware-verified end to end. Capture talks to cameras through a generic USB/PTP layer, so many Nikon, Canon, Sony and Fujifilm bodies should work through the same path — but each can have model-specific quirks, so treat anything beyond the D4S as unconfirmed for now. If your camera doesn't behave, please report it with .