Before you connect a camera
PhoTether is free software provided by an individual, not by Leica Camera AG. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Leica Camera AG.
PhoTether sends standard camera-control commands over Wi-Fi or USB. It does not modify or update your camera's firmware, and it does not change stored camera configuration except where you explicitly ask it to.
Even so, any software that controls hardware carries some risk. Please make sure your camera and phone have adequate battery, don't disconnect the camera mid-transfer, and keep your own backups of anything on the memory card.
If your camera behaves unexpectedly while using PhoTether, stop, disconnect, and let me know at [email protected]. I read every report.
PhoTether — End User Licence Agreement
Last updated: 2026-08-23
Licensor: PhoTether, an individual developer trading under that name, not a company
Contact: [email protected]
Applies to: PhoTether for Android, version 1.25 and later
1. This agreement, and who it is with
This is the licence for PhoTether ("the app"), an Android application that connects to certain digital cameras over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy or USB in order to control them and transfer images.
It is an agreement between you and me, trading as PhoTether, as an individual. Google is not a party to it. Where the app is obtained from Google Play, the separate Google Play Terms of Service govern your relationship with Google, and my Google Play Developer Distribution Agreement governs mine — see clause 4.
2. Accepting it
Installing or using the app means you accept this licence. If you do not accept it, do not install the app, and uninstall it if you already have.
3. What you may do
I grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to:
- install and use the app on any Android device you own or control, for as many devices as your
Google account entitles you to;
- reinstall it, and install the updates Google Play delivers to you;
- use it for your own photography, whether personal or professional. (Note that
Photether-Liability-Terms.md excludes liability for business losses — you may use the app commercially, but at your own risk.)
You keep this licence for as long as you comply with it. Nothing in it takes away rights Google Play separately grants you, and nothing in it is intended to restrict what UK or EU law allows you to do with software you have lawfully acquired — see clause 6.
4. Google Play
Where you obtained the app from Google Play:
- Google distributes it on my behalf. Google is not a party to this licence, gives you no
warranty in respect of the app, and has no obligation or liability to you under it.
- The Google Play Terms of Service continue to apply to you, and my Google Play Developer
Distribution Agreement continues to apply to me. If anything in this licence conflicts with either of those, they prevail and the conflicting part of this licence does not apply to you.
- Google Play may deliver updates automatically depending on your device settings, and may
reinstall or restore the app to devices on your account. That is a feature of Google Play, not something I control.
- Any refund is handled by Google under Google Play's refund policy. I cannot override it, shorten
it, or add conditions to it. See clause 5.
- Google Play's own family, content-rating and payment policies apply to the listing.
5. Price
The app is currently supplied free of charge. It contains no advertising, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions and no payment mechanism of any kind.
If a paid version, paid feature or in-app purchase is offered in future:
- it will be sold through Google Play's billing system, and Google Play's refund policy will apply
to it;
- your statutory rights in respect of paid digital content will apply, and those rights cannot
be excluded. Section 5 of Photether-Liability-Terms.md will be rewritten at that point — see Part C of this document;
- you will not be charged for a version of the app you already hold under this licence without
being asked first.
6. What you may not do
You may not:
- sell, rent, sub-licence, publish or otherwise distribute the app or any part of it, including by
uploading the APK to another store or download site;
- remove, obscure or alter any copyright, licence or attribution notice in the app;
- use the app to break the law, to access a camera you are not authorised to use, or to circumvent
a security or protection measure in a camera, its firmware, or anything else;
- present a modified version of the app as though it were mine.
Reverse engineering. Except as set out below, you may not decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer the app. That restriction does not apply where the law gives you the right to do it anyway: in particular, sections 50A to 50C of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (and the equivalent provisions in EU member states) permit a lawful user to make a back-up copy, to decompile in order to achieve interoperability with other software, and to observe, study or test the app to understand the ideas behind it. Those rights cannot be signed away and I do not attempt to take them from you.
7. Who owns what
I own the app, its source code, its design and its name, or hold the rights I need to license them to you. This licence gives you permission to use the app; it does not transfer ownership of anything.
Your photographs and your data are yours. I claim no licence, ownership or interest in the images you transfer, the metadata in them, or anything else the app stores on your device. The app sends none of it to me — there is no server of mine for it to go to. See the privacy policy at https://photether.com/privacy.
8. Camera manufacturers
PhoTether is independently developed. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to Leica Camera AG or any other camera manufacturer.
Manufacturer and model names appear in the app and in its store listing for one purpose only: to identify which cameras the app works with. Those names are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used descriptively, not as any claim of association.
9. Open-source components
The app includes third-party open-source software, each component under its own licence. PhoTether-Third-Party-Notices.md lists them.
For those components, their own licence governs, not this one. Nothing in this licence — clause 6 in particular — restricts any right an open-source licence grants you in respect of the component it covers. Where a component's licence requires that its terms or notices be passed on to you, that requirement is met by the notices document above; if you cannot reach it, ask me at [email protected] and I will send it to you.
10. Privacy
What the app does with your data, and the permissions it asks for, are described in the privacy policy at https://photether.com/privacy. It is not incorporated into this licence, and it is not a term you are agreeing to — it is a description of what happens, and it is answerable against the source code.
11. Updates, compatibility and support
I develop the app actively and may change, add or remove features between versions, including support for a particular camera.
The cameras and firmware versions the app is tested against are listed at https://photether.com/compatibility. Cameras or firmware outside that list may not work, and the app will normally refuse to connect rather than attempt commands it has not been tested with.
I provide no guaranteed support and no service level. I do read every problem report sent to [email protected], and section 9 of Photether-Liability-Terms.md explains what to include.
12. Ending this licence
You may end it at any time by uninstalling the app.
It ends automatically if you breach clause 6, in which case you must stop using the app and remove it from your devices. Ending the licence does not affect anything that has already happened, and clauses 7, 8, 13, 15 and 17 continue to apply afterwards.
I may stop distributing or updating the app at any time. That does not end your licence to keep using a copy you already hold.
13. Faults, liability and your statutory rights
The app is supplied free of charge, may contain faults, and controls camera hardware — which carries risk. What I am and am not responsible for, and the rights you have that cannot be taken away, are set out in sections 5 to 8 of Photether-Liability-Terms.md, which forms part of the terms on which the app is supplied to you and is available at https://photether.com/terms.
Those provisions are deliberately kept in one document rather than repeated here. Nothing in this licence limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by my negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.
14. Export controls and sanctions
The app implements TLS and DTLS in order to talk to cameras over a network, and therefore contains cryptographic functionality. You must not use, export or re-export it in breach of any applicable export control or sanctions law, and you confirm that you are not located in, and will not use it in, a territory to which such law prohibits its supply. Google applies its own export controls to distribution through Google Play.
15. Governing law and your local rights
This licence is governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.
If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the UK, in the EU or EEA, or in another country whose law gives you mandatory protections, you keep the benefit of those protections and you may bring proceedings in the courts where you live. Nothing here overrides a consumer right that cannot lawfully be overridden.
16. Changes to this licence
I may change this licence — to reflect changes to the app, or to the law, or when the app stops being free (clause 5). The current version will always be at https://photether.com/terms, with the date at the top of it.
Changes apply to versions of the app released after the change. They do not retroactively change the terms on which you were supplied a version you already have. If you do not accept a changed licence, do not install versions released after it.
17. General
- If any part of this licence is unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
- If I do not enforce something immediately, I do not lose the right to enforce it later.
- I may transfer my rights and obligations under this licence to someone else — for example if the
app changes hands — provided your rights under it are not reduced. You may not transfer yours.
- This licence, together with the liability terms it refers to in clause 13, is the whole agreement
between us about the app. It does not exclude liability for anything I have said fraudulently.
18. Contact
PhoTether — [email protected]
PhoTether — Terms of Use
Last updated: 2026-08-23
Supplied by: PhoTether, an individual developer trading under that name, not a company. Contact: [email protected]
Please read these terms before using PhoTether. They explain what PhoTether does, what it doesn't do, what I am responsible for, and what you are responsible for. Nothing in these terms takes away any right you have as a consumer that cannot lawfully be taken away.
These terms cover liability. What you may and may not do with the app, who owns what, and how all of this sits under Google Play's own terms are in the End User Licence Agreement, which is supplied with them. Google is not a party to either document.
1. What PhoTether is, and the basis it is supplied on
PhoTether is an independently developed Android application that connects to certain digital cameras over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy or USB in order to control them and transfer images.
It is supplied free of charge. I receive no payment from you for it, and I am not the manufacturer, retailer or authorised service agent for your camera. PhoTether is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Leica Camera AG or any other camera manufacturer, and manufacturer names are used only to identify which cameras PhoTether works with.
2. What PhoTether does and does not do
PhoTether communicates with your camera using standard Picture Transfer Protocol commands, and a limited set of manufacturer-specific commands, from an explicit list of commands built into the app.
PhoTether does not:
- modify, update, downgrade, flash or otherwise write to your camera's firmware;
- write to your camera's persistent configuration or stored settings, except where you
explicitly change a setting from within the app;
- send commands outside the built-in list referred to above;
- delete anything from your memory card unless you explicitly ask it to;
- send any of your data to me. I operate no server that the app talks to, there are no user
accounts, and the app contains no advertising and no analytics or tracking software;
- send anything to a camera manufacturer.
Data does leave your device in three cases, all of which you control:
- to your camera — control commands, and your location if you switch geotagging on;
- to a destination you configure yourself — the images you choose to upload, and the
credentials needed to log in, sent to the SMB share, FTP/FTPS server or folder you entered. These are your servers and folders; I have no destination of my own;
- to your device's geocoding service, if you turn on place names — the coordinates of a photo,
so they can be turned into a place name. On a device with Google Play services that request is answered by Google, under Google's privacy policy. This feature is off unless you switch it on.
The app also keeps a diagnostic log on your device (section 9). It is never transmitted automatically.
The privacy policy at https://photether.com/privacy describes all of this in full, and is the document Google Play's Data safety answers are drawn from. If the two ever disagree, that is a bug in one of them — fix it rather than relying on the more favourable one.
3. Compatibility and development status
PhoTether is tested against the camera models and firmware versions listed at https://photether.com/compatibility. Cameras or firmware versions outside that list may not work, and PhoTether will normally refuse to connect rather than attempt commands it has not been tested with.
PhoTether is actively developed and may contain faults. If it is at a pre-release or beta stage, that is stated clearly in the store listing and on first run.
4. Your responsibilities
Please:
- make sure both your camera and your phone have sufficient battery charge before starting a
session, particularly a long one;
- avoid disconnecting the camera, powering it off, or removing the memory card during a transfer;
- keep your own backups of images; PhoTether is not a backup system;
- check that your camera's firmware is a version listed at https://photether.com/compatibility;
- choose your upload destinations with care. If you enable plain FTP, the app warns you that the
connection is not encrypted and asks you to confirm; if you accept, your credentials and images travel unprotected across your network, and that is your decision, not a fault in the app;
- stop using PhoTether and contact me if your camera behaves unexpectedly.
5. Quality
Because PhoTether is supplied free of charge and not together with anything you have paid for, the statutory quality rights for paid digital content do not apply to it. I make no promise that it will be free of faults, uninterrupted, or fit for any particular purpose, and I cannot commit to fixing any specific fault or to supporting any specific camera.
That said, I do take care over it, and section 6 below explains what happens if something goes wrong.
6. If PhoTether damages your camera or your phone
I take the risk of hardware damage seriously, which is why PhoTether does not touch firmware and sends only commands from an explicit list.
If PhoTether causes damage to your camera or your phone, and that damage would not have happened if I had taken reasonable care and skill, then under section 46 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 you may require me either to repair the damage at my own cost or to pay you appropriate compensation. I do not exclude that right. Please contact me at [email protected] and I will respond within 7 days.
Subject to section 7, and only so far as it is fair to do so, my total liability to you under section 46 in respect of any one incident is limited to £200. I set a limit because PhoTether is provided free of charge by one person with no revenue from it; without some limit I could not responsibly make it available at all. If you would prefer not to accept that limit, please do not use PhoTether.
7. What I do not limit or exclude
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes my liability for:
- death or personal injury caused by my negligence;
- fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or
- anything else which cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.
8. Losses I am not responsible for
I am not responsible for:
- lost or corrupted images, other than as set out in section 6;
- missed shots, missed jobs, cancelled bookings, lost profits, lost business, wasted expenditure
or damage to reputation;
- loss arising from your use of PhoTether for business purposes, since PhoTether is supplied for
personal use;
- loss caused by a fault in your camera, its firmware, your phone, your network, or other
software you are running;
- loss caused by a destination you configured — including anything that happens to images or
credentials sent over an unencrypted connection you chose to accept; or
- loss caused by your not following the guidance in section 4, where following it would have
avoided the loss.
9. Reporting problems
If something goes wrong, email [email protected] with your camera model, firmware version, phone model and Android version, and what happened. PhoTether keeps a local diagnostic log which you can export and attach; it stays on your device unless you choose to send it.
10. General
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you live elsewhere in the UK or in another country, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections that apply where you live, and you may bring proceedings in your own courts.
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
I may update these terms; the current version will always be at https://photether.com/terms and in the app.