Note to self… Permanent Power to a Transcend Wifi SD Card in a Nikon Camera

Thursday, 12 March, 2020

I had been looking through my box of “spare stuff” to find a slightly ageing Transcend Wifi SD Card which I could use in my Nikon D800. To cut a long story short, I wanted to upload a few selected photos from the card to my smartphone and this seemed like the easiest way. OK, so the card is a little slow, but for a few photos that’s fine. The first task was to upgrade the firmware of the card to the latest version, install the WiFi SD App and then connect to the camera. It didn’t work. In fact, the smartphone couldn’t find the card at all which suggested that the card wasn’t being powered. I tried scanning at the same time as I was taking a photo and the card would briefly appear before disappearing.

Clearly the card is not continually powered by the camera and after some slightly long-winded Googling I found this page. In short, there are two modes where the card is constantly powered:

  • Live View
  • “Auto-Meter Off Delay” switched off

The “Auto-Meter Off Delay” from your Custom Settings is the one to change (and select it as an option on your MyMenu). Once you set this to infinity the camera powers the card and you can then access it via the smartphone app.

If you are using something like Snapseed on your phone to edit, then it is a whole lot quicker to shoot in “RAW+JPEG Basic” (the 36MP resolution means “Basic” is actually pretty detailed!), before uploading just the JPEG.